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Roast Lamb
Wipe the meat with a damp towel, place in a baking pan, and dredge with pepper. Add a cup of boiling water and a teaspoon of salt to the pan. Baste every ten minutes, and let bake fifteen minutes to the pound in a very hot oven.
When done take up on a heated dish, garnish with cress and serve with mint sauce and green peas.
A bare-bones roast of the kind written for cooks who already knew how a leg of lamb behaved. Two things need translating: the oven and the doneness.
- "A very hot oven"In period ranges this means 450-475F. Modern practice is to sear at that heat for 15-20 minutes, then drop to 325-350F for the remainder, which gives a more even interior and less shrinkage.
- Fifteen minutes to the poundThe recipe does not name the cut; on a bone-in leg this lands somewhere between medium-rare and medium, and the rule is unreliable across cuts and shapes. Use a thermometer in the thickest part away from bone: 130-135F for medium-rare, 140-145F for medium. Rest 15 minutes before carving.
- DredgeHere it means to dust the surface, not to coat in flour for frying. Pepper alone as written; you may prefer to salt the meat rather than only the pan water, and garlic slivers pushed into the fat are a modern addition.
- The cup of boiling waterIt keeps the drippings from scorching and produces the base for gravy, but it also steams the underside of the joint. If you want a crisp exterior, use a rack and add the water only if the pan begins to smoke.
- Basting every ten minutesOptional at best. Repeated oven-opening drops the temperature and lengthens the roast; lamb has enough fat of its own. Baste two or three times if you like the look of it.
- CressGarden or watercress, served raw around the platter as a peppery counterpoint. Any sharp small leaf does the same job.
- Mint sauceNot jelly. The intended sauce is chopped mint steeped in vinegar with a little sugar, thin and sharp, made an hour ahead.
- YieldA 5-6 lb bone-in leg serves six to eight, with enough left for cold lamb the next day.
Roast lamb with mint sauce and green peas is the English Sunday dinner transplanted whole into American domestic cookery, and its brevity here is the point: the cook was assumed to know the method and to want only the proportions and the accompaniments. The pairing of lamb with mint and vinegar is old in British practice and is often explained as a way of cutting the fat of mutton, the stronger and more common meat before refrigerated shipping made young lamb widely affordable. Peas belong to the same logic of season: spring lamb and the first shelling peas arrive together, and the combination survives on menus long after the calendar stopped enforcing it.