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Boiled Quarter of Lamb
Take a plump hind leg, put into a kettle and cover with boiling water. Set over the fire and let come to a boil, pour in a pint of cold water and let simmer gently until done. Take the meat up on a hot dish, garnish with boiled cauliflower and serve with caper sauce.
A plain boiled leg of lamb, of the kind that once anchored a spring dinner. The original gives no time, no seasoning and no temperature, so most of the work is filling in what a nineteenth-century cook took for granted.
- "Quarter" versus legThe title says quarter but the instruction says hind leg — in period usage a hind quarter often meant the leg with part of the loin attached. Buy a bone-in leg of 5-7 lb; anything larger will not sit covered in a domestic pot.
- The kettleA kettle here is a large lidded pot, not a tea kettle. You need one deep enough to keep the joint submerged throughout, since any part standing above the water cooks unevenly and greys.
- The pint of cold waterBringing the pot to a boil and then pouring in cold water checks the boil and settles the pot back to a gentle simmer, which is what keeps the meat tender; in a large kettle a pint will only knock the temperature back briefly, so the fire has to be eased as well. A rolling boil for an hour will give you dry, stringy lamb. Hold the water at 180-190F, barely trembling.
- TimingReckon roughly 20 minutes per pound after the water returns to a simmer, but cook to temperature rather than clock: 145F at the thickest part, away from the bone, for pink lamb; 155-160F if you want it fully grey in the old style. Rest 15 minutes before carving.
- Seasoning the waterThe recipe says nothing about it. Add a generous tablespoon of salt, an onion stuck with cloves, a carrot, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns. Skim the grey scum off in the first ten minutes or the finished meat tastes muddy.
- Caper sauceThe period sauce is a white or béchamel base — butter and flour cooked out, thinned with some of the strained lamb broth and a little milk or cream, then stirred through with drained capers and a squeeze of lemon. Made with the cooking liquor it is far better than with milk alone.
- The cauliflowerBoil it separately, not in the lamb water, and stop it while the stem still has resistance — eight to ten minutes for florets. Cauliflower cooked to nineteenth-century softness collapses into the sauce.
- Yield and the leftover brothA 6 lb leg serves eight to ten. The strained cooking liquid is a light lamb broth worth chilling, lifting the fat off, and keeping for soup or barley.
Boiling was a common treatment for a leg of mutton or lamb in British and American kitchens: it needed no oven, only a pot over the fire, and it produced both a dinner and a stock in one operation. Caper sauce is the usual partner, the sharp pickled buds cutting the fat of the joint much as mint sauce does with roast lamb; the pairing was conventional by the mid-nineteenth century and appears in many English-language household manuals. A book aimed at the practical housekeeper gives boiled meats such prominence in part because a controlled simmer over a range was easier to hold than a steady oven. The trick of checking the boil with a pint of cold water is older than the book and shows up in many forms -- cooks knew from experience, without knowing the chemistry, that hard boiling toughens muscle protein.