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Lamb, Hind-Quarter Of
Take a hind-quarter of lamb, saw off the knuckle-bone, and wrap the joint in oiled or buttered paper. Put the roasting hook through the shank end, and place the joint before a clear fire. Baste it frequently with good dripping. Twenty minutes before it is taken down dredge a little flour over it, brown it nicely, and place it on a hot dish, with two or three table-spoonfuls of good gravy with it, and the rest in a tureen. Mint sauce should always accompany roast lamb. A cut lemon should be sent to table with this joint, and an empty dish upon which the carver may place the leg when it is severed from the loin. Time, two hours and a half, or twenty minutes to each pound, and twenty minutes over. Young white meat must be thoroughly cooked. Probable cost, 11d. per pound. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
This is a spit-roast written for an open fire, and the whole method has to be translated before the timings make any sense. The joint itself is also larger than most butchers now cut without notice.
- What a hind-quarter isThe leg and the loin still joined; the recipe's own timing (twenty minutes to the pound plus twenty over, giving two and a half hours) implies a joint of about 6½ lb — which is why the recipe warns you to send an empty dish for the leg once it is carved off the loin. Most butchers will need this ordered in advance; a whole bone-in leg is the usual substitute.
- Fire to oven"Before a clear fire" means a fire burnt down to steady radiant heat with no flame or smoke, the meat hanging on a hook and turning. In an oven, start at 425F for 20 minutes to set the surface, then drop to 350F for the remainder, on a rack over a tray.
- The buttered paperThe oiled or buttered paper is the hinge of the method — it shields the thin loin end and the fat from scorching radiant heat. Bake parchment or foil loosely over the loin serves the same purpose in an oven, removed for the last 20 minutes.
- Timing, and the instruction to overcookTwenty minutes per pound plus twenty gives two and a half hours for a joint of about 6½ lb (an 8 lb joint would come to three hours), which by modern practice is well past done. "Young white meat must be thoroughly cooked" reflects a period belief about lamb and veal, not a food-safety requirement; whole cuts of lamb are judged by internal temperature — around 130-135F at the thickest part of the leg for pink, 145F for medium — and want 20 minutes' rest.
- Dredging and browningThe flour dredge in the last 20 minutes, called frothing, gives a crisp speckled crust as it catches the basting fat. In an oven, raise the heat back to 425F for those minutes or the flour simply sits pale on the surface.
- Basting fat"Good dripping" is fat saved from earlier roasts, usually beef. The lamb's own rendered fat from the tray does the job; there is no need to add anything.
- GravyThe recipe does not say where the gravy comes from; roasting before a fire yields dripping caught in a pan but no browned pan residue, and gravy was commonly made separately from bones and trimmings. Deglazing the roasting tray is the modern shortcut.
- Yield and costEight to ten as stated, generously, with leftovers from a joint this size. The 11d. per pound is a late-Victorian retail price and is of interest only as a period record.
Cassell's places this among the plain roasts that formed the backbone of a middle-class English dinner, and the details it fusses over are all carving-table details: the empty dish for the severed leg, the cut lemon, the mint sauce declared obligatory. The hind-quarter was a display joint, and it belongs to a period when meat was still cooked by radiant heat in front of the fire rather than in an enclosed oven — the roasting hook and frequent basting are the marks of that technique, and the closed oven, which bakes as much as it roasts, only gradually displaced it through the second half of the nineteenth century. Mint sauce with lamb is an English pairing of long standing, generally traced to the older practice of serving sharp herb-and-vinegar sauces with young fatty meat, and the accompanying lemon does the same work by another route.