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Braised Shoulder of Lamb
Bone a shoulder of lamb, leave the knuckle and fill the cavity with a rich bread stuffing; tie it neatly in shape and wrap in a buttered paper. Lay in a deep pan with two ounces of butter, a sliced carrot and turnip each, an onion stuck with cloves and a bunch of sweet herbs.
Pour over sufficient stock to cover the bottom of the pan. Set over a slow fire and let simmer gently, baste every ten minutes. When nearly done lift from the pan, remove the paper; brush the meat with melted glaze and set in the oven to brown. on a heated dish. pour around it. of green peas d'hotel sauce.
A classic braise written for a coal range, with the last few lines of the original garbled in printing — the finish is a heated dish, green peas poured around, and a maître d'hôtel sauce. Everything else is workable as written.
- The hinge: gentle heat, not a boil"Set over a slow fire and let simmer gently" means the liquid should barely tremble. A shoulder is collagen-rich and needs long, low cooking to become tender; a rolling boil squeezes it dry and stringy. A covered pan in a 300–325F oven is the easiest modern equivalent to a slow fire, and it bastes more evenly than a burner.
- Boning the shoulderAsk the butcher to bone it and leave the shank (knuckle) attached — it holds the shape and looks well on the dish. A boned shoulder runs roughly 3 to 4 lb and will serve six.
- Buttered paperParchment, buttered on one side, tied over the joint. It keeps the surface from drying and taking colour during the long simmer, which is why it comes off before browning. Foil does the same job but seals more tightly and will steam the outside.
- Rich bread stuffingPeriod usage means soft breadcrumbs bound with butter or suet and egg, seasoned with the same sweet herbs used in the pan. Pack it loosely; it swells. Stuffing inside a rolled joint reaches temperature slowly, so allow the extra time rather than raising the heat.
- "Sufficient stock to cover the bottom"This is a braise, not a stew: just enough stock to film the bottom of the pan, topped up if it cooks away. The vegetables and cloved onion are aromatics for the liquid, not a garnish; strain them out at the end.
- GlazeNineteenth-century glaze is stock reduced until it is syrupy and sets firm when cold — what a modern kitchen calls glace de viande. The braising liquid, degreased and boiled down hard, gives the same thing. Brush it on and set it in a hot oven only long enough to colour and lacquer the surface, watching it so the glaze does not burn.
- Timing and donenessFigure 2½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer. Shoulder is done when a skewer slides in with no resistance, well past the 145F that suits a rack or a loin; the connective tissue needs to reach the 180F range to soften.
- The garbled endingThe last lines have lost words in typesetting. The likely sense: serve on a heated dish, pour a border of green peas around it, and serve with maitre d'hotel sauce — in period books usually butter worked with parsley, lemon juice and seasoning, melted over the meat.
Braising a boned and stuffed shoulder was one common way to make the cheapest large cut of lamb behave like a roast. Shoulder is worked muscle, uneven in thickness and awkward on the carving board; boning it, filling the cavity with bread stuffing and tying it into a cylinder solved both problems at once and stretched the meat further, which is exactly the kind of economy such cookery was built around. The technique itself is straight out of the French repertoire that American cookbooks absorbed through the late nineteenth century the cloved onion, the bunch of sweet herbs, the carrot and turnip, the buttered paper, the final coat of glaze and a hot oven to colour it. Ma tre d'h tel butter and green peas as the accompaniment were a conventional dressing for spring lamb, and the pairing appears often enough in books of this period to look like a settled habit.