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Lamb, Leg of, Roast
Put the lamb down to a clear, even fire. Baste it plentifully with good dripping, and twenty minutes before it is ready to serve, bring it nearer to the fire to brown it nicely. Place the lamb on a hot dish, pour over it a small quantity of gravy made from the contents of the dripping-pan, and send a little more to table in a tureen. Mint sauce and green peas, or boiled cauliflower, usually accompany this dish. Time to roast, twenty minutes to the pound. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Sufficient for five or six persons.
This is spit-roasting instructions written for an open coal range, but everything in it translates to an oven with one adjustment: the timing.
- Oven, not fireFor an oven roast, start at 425F for 20 minutes to colour the outside, then drop to 350F for the remainder. The original's trick of moving the joint nearer the fire at the end is the reverse order, which suits radiant heat but not a closed oven.
- Twenty minutes to the poundThat is well-done lamb by modern taste — around 170F at the centre. For pink lamb, pull the leg at 130-135F internal, which on a 5 lb bone-in leg is roughly 15 minutes per pound. Rest it 15-20 minutes before carving.
- Basting with drippingDripping in period usage most often meant beef dripping, which gives a good savoury crust; the recipe itself says only "good dripping". Butter, olive oil, or the lamb's own rendered fat all work. Frequent basting matters less in an oven than over a fire, where it protected the surface from scorching.
- The gravy"Gravy made from the contents of the dripping-pan" means pour off the fat, deglaze the pan with stock or water, scrape up the browned bits, and season. No flour is implied here — this is a thin jus, not a thickened gravy.
- Mint sauceThe book assumes you know it: chopped mint, sugar, and vinegar, made an hour ahead so the sugar dissolves and the mint bleeds. It is sharp and thin, not a jelly.
- Cost1s. per pound is a shilling — a real sum in the 1870s, and a reminder that a leg of lamb was a Sunday-dinner joint rather than an everyday one.
- YieldFive or six persons implies a leg of about 4-5 lb, in a period where a roast joint shared a table with several other dishes. The same joint feeds four generously today.
Roast leg of lamb with mint sauce and green peas is about as fixed a combination as British cookery has, and it is fixed by the calendar as much as by taste: spring lamb, the first peas, and mint all arrive together, which is why the dish attached itself to Easter and to early-summer Sunday dinners. A plain roast was the test of a cook's judgement of the fire — the whole skill lay in managing a "clear, even" bed of coals and knowing when to bring the meat forward to brown. The pairing of mint with lamb is generally traced to the long English habit of serving sharp, sweet-sour sauces with fatty meat, the same instinct that puts apple with pork and redcurrant with mutton.