Home › The Principles of Cookery › Lamb, Shoulder of, Stuffed and Braised
Lamb, Shoulder of, Stuffed and Braised
Take a shoulder of lamb, remove the blade-bone without injuring the outer skin, but leave in the shankbone. Fill the cavity from which the bone has been removed with good veal forcemeat. Sprinkle the inner surface with a little salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg, and draw together the edges of the shoulder with some strong thread. Put the lamb into a braising-pan or stewpan with slices of fat bacon under and over it. Put with it two onions, three or four sticks of celery, a bunch of savoury herbs, and a pint and a half of white stock. Braise the lamb for two hours over a slow fire. Take it up, drain it, boil the gravy down quickly, and glaze the meat. After glazing, serve with either cucumber, tomato, or sorrel sauce. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A boned-and-rolled shoulder braise that works as well now as it did in the 1870s, provided you treat the braise as a low oven rather than a fire and reduce the liquid properly at the end.
- The hinge: the glazeAfter the meat comes out, the braising liquid must be strained and boiled hard until it is syrupy enough to coat the back of a spoon, then brushed over the meat. Skip that reduction and you have thin gravy rather than the lacquered surface the recipe is aiming at.
- QuantitiesA pint and a half in an English book of this date is imperial, about 30 fl oz, or a little over 3 1/2 US cups. Use enough stock to come a third to halfway up the meat, no more, or there is nothing to reduce.
- Braising heat"A slow fire" means barely trembling. The book gives no oven temperatures, but a covered pot in a low oven is a workable modern equivalent. The recipe allows two hours; judge doneness by the meat pulling easily from the shank bone rather than by a fixed time or reading.
- Veal forcemeatThe period stuffing is minced veal with shredded suet, breadcrumbs, lemon zest, parsley and egg to bind. Minced veal is now a special order in many places; ground pork or a pork-and-veal mix behaves identically. Season it and fry a teaspoonful to taste before it goes in.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or chicken stock, pale because the bones are blanched rather than browned. Any low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid dark beef stock, which muddies the finished glaze.
- Fat baconThis is chiefly barding rather than seasoning. Unsmoked streaky bacon or thin sheets of pork back fat are closer to the original than modern heavily smoked bacon, which will dominate the sauce.
- Trussing"Strong thread" means a stout kitchen thread or butcher's twine; the recipe draws the cut edges together, so sew or tie the pocket closed or it will gape and lose stuffing.
- The saucesCucumber and sorrel sauces were commonly made as vegetable purées finished with a white sauce or velouté; sorrel and tomato in particular bring acidity against the fat of the shoulder. Sorrel is seasonal and easiest from a farmers' market; a tomato sauce is the simplest of the three to reach for.
- Yield and costFour to five servings, as stated. The "1s. per pound" is a Victorian retail price and has no modern equivalent.
Braising, from the French braiser, was among the techniques English cookery writers of the later nineteenth century took from French professional kitchens, because it made the sinewy, well-worked cuts of a carcass behave like better ones. A shoulder is exactly such a cut, awkward to carve around the blade bone, which is why the bone comes out and forcemeat goes into the cavity — the same logic behind the boned and stuffed shoulders that appear in French household cookery as épaule d'agneau farcie. The three suggested sauces are all acidic or vegetal, following the long-standing English pairing of lamb with something sharp; sorrel in particular was a common kitchen-garden green in Britain well into the nineteenth century and had largely dropped out of domestic use by the mid-twentieth, which is why it now reads as the most unfamiliar of the three.