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Lamb, Boned, Quarter Of
Take the bone from a quarter of lamb, being careful to keep the knife close to the bone, spread over the meat half a pound of veal force-meat, roll it round securely, skewer it firmly, and bind it with tape. Put it down to a clear fire, and baste liberally, with good beef or mutton fat. Send mint sauce to table with it. Time to roast the lamb, twenty minutes to the pound. Probable cost, 1s. 1d. per pound. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
A boned, stuffed and rolled joint cooked at an open fire. Everything here translates to an oven, but the stuffing changes how you judge doneness.
- What a "quarter" isThe recipe does not say fore or hind, though a hindquarter (leg plus loin) is the part best suited to boning and rolling, and is sold today as a short saddle and leg, rarely as one piece. Boned out, a quarter of a small lamb gives roughly 6-8 lb of meat, broadly consistent with the stated eight or nine servings. A boned leg and a boned loin tied together achieve the same thing.
- Veal forcemeatGround veal bound with breadcrumbs, suet, egg and lemon peel, with parsley and mace or nutmeg. Half a pound is about 8 oz for the whole joint — a thin layer, not a thick core. Ground pork or a pork-and-veal mix behaves the same way; plain veal alone can be dry.
- The instruction that mattersKeep the knife against the bone and remove it in one piece, leaving the meat as an unbroken sheet. A pocket cut through into the surface will leak forcemeat and unravel the roll on the skewer.
- Skewers and tapeThe tape is cotton binding tape, wound round the roll to hold its shape. Butcher's twine tied at 1-inch intervals does the job; the skewers are there only to close the ends before tying.
- Fire to ovenA clear fire with liberal basting means a hot exterior and constant surface fat. The book gives no temperature; in a modern oven, roughly 425F for 20 minutes to set and colour the outside, then 350F for the remainder, is a reasonable equivalent. Beef or mutton fat can be replaced with beef dripping, duck fat or butter.
- Time and temperatureTwenty minutes to the pound gives well-done lamb by modern standards, but a joint with raw ground veal inside it needs a hot centre. Cook to 160F in the forcemeat layer, which will usually arrive well before the full 20-minutes-per-pound figure on a rolled joint of this size.
- Resting and carvingRest 20 minutes under foil before cutting the twine, or the roll relaxes and the slices fall apart. Carve across the roll in thick rounds so each has meat and stuffing.
- The price1s 1d per pound is a late-Victorian retail figure and has no bearing on anything now; it is included in Cassell's as a housekeeping guide, not a recipe instruction.
Boning, stuffing and rolling a joint was standard practice in the large Victorian kitchen for reasons usually explained as partly economic and partly about the carving table: the bone was said to come out for use in stock, a cheap forcemeat padded out expensive meat, and the resulting roll could, it is often argued, be sliced cleanly by a servant or a host who was not skilled with a knife. Veal forcemeat was among the commonest stuffings of English cookery books of the period, used in everything from roast fowl to fish, and Cassell's assumes the reader already knows the mixture. Mint sauce with lamb is an English habit often traced to the eighteenth century, though the dating is uncertain, and was, by the time this dictionary appeared, so fixed that the recipe simply says to send it to table without explaining what it is. The direction to baste with beef or mutton fat rather than the lamb's own is generally taken to reflect spit roasting, where a lean rolled joint turning in front of a fire loses surface moisture fast and needs fat supplied from the dripping pan.