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LAMB, COOKED WHOLE (sometimes called Lamb a l'Espagnole)
On the Continent lambs are occasionally roasted entire, something like sucking pigs, and are very delicate and good. It is evident that for this the animal must be very young, not more than five or six weeks old. The only preparation required is to remove the skin, take out the fry, and cut off the feet; then cover the lamb with slices of bacon fastened on with small string, put it down to a clear fire, and let it remain until done enough. Take the bacon off about a quarter of an hour before the lamb is taken up, so that it may brown, and take care that it is equally cooked all over. Squeeze the juice of a lemon over it before serving, and send bread sauce and brown gravy to table in a tureen. Time to roast, two hours and a half or three hours. Probable cost, uncertain, lambs suitable for this dish being seldom offered for sale. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
An open-fire spit roast of a milk-fed lamb, written when a whole carcass on a string before the hearth was still an ordinary thing to attempt. Everything hinges on the size and age of the animal, which is also the hardest part to reproduce.
- The animalA lamb of five or six weeks is a milk lamb, dressing out at roughly 15-25 lb. It is not a supermarket item; order well ahead from a Greek, Italian, Middle Eastern or halal butcher, or direct from a farm, and specify the weight of the dressed carcass rather than the age.
- "Take out the fry"The fry is the pluck: heart, liver, lights and sweetbreads. A butcher will have removed all of it, along with the skin and feet, so the preparation in the recipe is already done for you. Ask for the offal separately if you want it.
- Fitting it in an ovenA whole carcass of this size will not go into a domestic oven. Either spit-roast it over coals as written, or have the butcher split it lengthwise and roast the two halves flat on racks over trays in a moderate oven, around 325F. The book gives no temperature: a "clear fire" is a bright, smokeless one, and the figure here is a modern convenience, not a translation.
- Barding, and when to strip itThe bacon is there because a milk lamb carries almost no fat of its own. Streaky bacon or thin sheets of pork fatback tied on with butcher's twine both work. Removing it for the last 15 minutes is the instruction that decides how the dish looks, so do not skip it.
- Time and donenessTwo and a half to three hours is credible for a small carcass at the fire, but go by temperature: 145F at the thickest part of the leg, well away from bone, for pink meat, or 160F for the firmer, more traditional result. A large carcass may need considerably longer, so start early and hold it wrapped if it finishes ahead.
- Turning"Take care that it is equally cooked all over" means constant attention. On a spit, keep it moving; on racks in an oven, rotate the trays and swap shelves every 30 minutes, and shield the thin flank and shoulder ends with foil once they colour.
- Bread sauce and gravyBread sauce is milk infused with onion and cloves, thickened with fresh white breadcrumbs and finished with butter. The brown gravy would have been made from a separate meat stock, since a lamb this lean throws very little in the way of pan drippings; a good reduced lamb or veal stock stands in.
- YieldEight to ten is right for a small carcass, and generous. Carve the legs and shoulders whole and serve the ribs in sections.
Cassell's presents this as a Continental habit rather than an English one, and the alternative name points to Spain, where lechazo or cordero lechal — killed at a few weeks and traditionally roasted whole in a bread oven — remains a regional speciality of Castile and León, as abbacchio and agnello da latte do in Italy. British butchery went the other way: the nineteenth-century English table prized house lamb and spring lamb but wanted joints, not carcasses, and the book itself admits such lambs are "seldom offered for sale." The comparison with sucking pig is the giveaway that this is a set piece for a hearth and a spit rather than a range, not something the reader was expected to attempt on a Tuesday.