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Lamb, Bladebone of, Broiled
Take a cold shoulder of lamb weighing from two to three pounds, and score the flesh to the bones in squares about an inch apart. Make a powder by mixing together a tea-spoonful of salt, a tea-spoonful of pepper, and half a tea-spoonful of dry mustard. Rub this well into the flesh, then place the meat on a hot gridiron, put it four or five inches above a clear fire, and broil it first on one side and then on the other until it is hot throughout. Place it on a hot dish, brush it over with clarified butter, squeeze the juice of a lemon upon it, and serve as hot as possible. If preferred, the meat can be egged and bread-crumbed before being broiled. Time to broil, about a quarter of an hour. The hot mixture should be rubbed into the joint some hours before it is broiled.
This is a devil: cold roast lamb reheated over fire with a hot dry seasoning rubbed into scored flesh. The meat is already cooked, so the whole job is browning the surface and warming the middle without drying it out.
- Start with leftovers"Bladebone" means the shoulder blade and the meat around it, taken from a shoulder already roasted and gone cold. A 2-3 lb piece off a roast shoulder is what the recipe assumes; buying a raw shoulder and following these instructions will give you scorched outside and raw inside.
- Score, then season earlyThe cuts to the bone at 1-inch intervals are not decorative. They let the salt, pepper and mustard reach the interior and give the fire more surface to crisp. The final line of the recipe is the hinge: rub the mixture in several hours ahead, cover, and refrigerate.
- Gridiron equivalentAn overhead broiler set to high with the rack 4-5 inches from the element is the closest match, and a ridged grill pan or a charcoal grill works as well. The original wants a "clear fire" - embers with no flame or smoke - so let charcoal ash over before the meat goes on.
- TimingAbout fifteen minutes total, turned once, is right for reheating. Judge it by an internal temperature of roughly 140-150F at the thickest point rather than by the clock; past that the already-cooked meat turns dry and stringy.
- The seasoning is assertiveA teaspoon each of salt and pepper on 2-3 lb of meat is a proper devil, not a light seasoning. Fine-grained salt measures saltier by volume than coarse salt, so measure with a coarse salt or scale it back slightly if the lamb was salted before roasting.
- Egged and crumbedIf you take the optional coating, use dry fine crumbs and move the meat further from the heat, 6 inches or so. Crumbs under a fierce broiler blacken well before the joint is warm through.
- Clarified butter and lemonClarified butter is butter melted so the milk solids separate out, the clear fat then poured off them; it brushes on cleanly and does not spot. Add it and the lemon juice off the heat, at the dish, or the lemon steams away and the butter burns.
- YieldA 2-3 lb bladebone with bone in serves three or four as a main course, more as a breakfast or supper dish. Serve on a warmed platter - the recipe's insistence on "as hot as possible" matters because lamb fat sets quickly on a cold plate.
Devilling was the standard Victorian answer to cold roast meat: score it, rub in something hot - mustard, cayenne, pepper, sometimes chutney or anchovy - and put it back over the fire. The bladebone took the treatment well, since the meat clinging to the shoulder blade is well-marbled and takes a crust nicely. Dishes of this kind belonged to the breakfast sideboard and the late supper after cards or the theatre, when a household wanted something savoury and quick that did not require the cook to start a fresh joint.