Home › The Principles of Cookery › Lamb, with Rice
Lamb, with Rice
Three-parts roast a loin, breast, or small fore-quarter of lamb. Cut it into neat pieces, strew a little salt and pepper over these, and lay them in a deep dish, with as much nicely-flavoured stock as will just cover the bottom of the dish. Boil half a pound of rice with a quart of water, two ounces of butter, and a blade of mace, until the rice is quite tender, and the water absorbed. Add a little salt, and beat the rice thoroughly; then mix with it the yolks of two eggs well beaten. Spread the rice over the lamb, and brush over it the well-beaten yolk of another egg. Put the meat into a moderate oven, until it is lightly browned all over. Time to roast the lamb, twelve minutes to the pound. Probable cost, lamb, 10d. or 1s. per pound; rice, 4d. per pound. Sufficient, a small quarter of lamb for six or seven persons.
A part-roasted joint finished under a lid of buttery, egg-enriched rice — effectively a rice-crusted shepherd's pie made with lamb still on the bone. Two things matter: the meat must be genuinely underdone when it goes into the dish, and the rice must be cooked dry enough to hold a shape.
- "Three-parts roast"Roast until about three-quarters done, then carve. The joint finishes cooking under the rice, so pulling it early is what keeps it from drying out. For a loin that means taking it out well short of done if you want it pink at the end.
- Twelve minutes to the poundThis appears to be the full roasting time, and assumes a small, thin joint. Modern joints are often larger; go by a thermometer rather than the clock -- 130-135F for medium-rare, higher if you want it cooked through.
- A moderate oven350F for the final browning. Ten to twenty minutes is usually enough to set the egg glaze and colour the top; longer and the yolk crust turns leathery.
- The riceHalf a pound is about 1 1/4 cups, and a quart of water is 4 cups — a deliberately generous ratio meant to produce soft, sticky pudding rice that will beat into a paste. Use a short- or medium-grain rice; long-grain basmati stays separate and will not spread.
- Blade of maceA single dried strip of the aril around the nutmeg. Ground mace works at roughly 1/4 teaspoon, or substitute a light grating of nutmeg. Remove the blade before beating in the yolks.
- Beating the riceThis is the hinge. Work the hot cooked rice hard with a wooden spoon until it breaks down into a thick, spreadable mass, then let it cool a minute before stirring in the yolks so they thicken rather than scramble.
- Stock in the dishOnly enough to film the bottom — a few tablespoons. This is there to keep the underside of the meat moist, not to stew it; too much and the rice lid sits in liquid.
- Costs and yieldThe prices are pre-decimal (12 pence to a shilling) and of purely historical interest. As written it serves six or seven, from a small quarter of lamb with the full quantity of rice.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the British household dictionary, when a kitchen manual was expected to tell a cook not only how to roast a joint but how to account for every scrap of it afterwards. This recipe sits at the junction of two Victorian habits: the horror of waste, and the enthusiasm for rice as a cheap, filling extender -- rice at fourpence a pound against lamb at a shilling made the arithmetic obvious. Dishes of meat sealed under a starchy crust were common in the period, from cottage and shepherd's pies to potato-topped hashes. Rice was by this date an ordinary sight in a domestic kitchen rather than a curiosity, though whether this particular treatment owes anything to Anglo-Indian pilaus and kedgerees is not something the recipe tells us. The egg-yolk wash brushed over the top gilds the surface, a device long familiar from pastry work.