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Braised Breast of Lamb
With a sharp pointed knife remove the bones.
Flatten the meat, sprinkle with salt and pepper, roll up and tie. In a deep kettle put a scant 1/2 cupful each of chopped onion, carrot and turnip.
Add I large spoonful of dripping or salt pork fat and cook slowly until lightly colored. Lay in the meat, pour round it 1 pint of boiling water, cover closely and place in a moderate oven.
Allow forty-five minutes to the pound; add more water if it evaporates too much. When done strain the gravy and serve with the meat. Vary this by using stewed and strained tomato instead of water.
A boned, rolled and braised breast of lamb — one of the fattiest, cheapest cuts on the animal, and one that rewards long slow cooking. Two things need translating: the oven, and the fat.
- The hinge: degrease the gravyBreast of lamb renders a great deal of fat, and straining alone will not remove it. Let the liquid settle a few minutes and skim, or chill it briefly so the fat lifts off in a sheet. Skipping this gives you a greasy sauce rather than a sauce.
- "A moderate oven"350F. For a braise of this length 325F is steadier and less likely to reduce the liquid to nothing.
- TimingForty-five minutes to the pound is generous but not wrong for this cut — a boned breast weighs roughly 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 lb, which by the recipe's own rule works out to about 1 to 2 hours. Judge by feel rather than the clock: the meat should give easily to a skewer and the roll should slump slightly when the string is cut.
- Boning the breastYou are removing the rib bones and the flat sternum cartilage. Work the knife tip along the top of each rib and pull it free; a butcher will do it on request. Trim the thickest surface fat before rolling, or the roll will collapse as it renders.
- "1 large spoonful of dripping"A rounded tablespoon. Beef dripping or salt pork fat were what a low-cost kitchen had; oil or bacon fat serve the same purpose, which is only to sweat the vegetables.
- TurnipWhite turnip, not swede or rutabaga, though either works. The onion-carrot-turnip trio here is the pot vegetable base, cooked to flavour the liquid, not a garnish — it will be soft and spent by the end and is discarded when the gravy is strained.
- A deep kettle in the ovenAny heavy lidded pot that goes from burner to oven — a Dutch oven is exactly right. The lid must fit closely; if it does not, lay foil under it.
- The tomato variationUse about a pint of passata or sieved canned tomatoes in place of the pint of water. The acidity balances the richness of the cut, though it removes none of the rendered fat — skim as before.
- YieldA single breast will likely stretch to three servings, perhaps four with potatoes; the recipe gives no yield. Cold, the roll slices cleanly for sandwiches the next day.
Breast of lamb is the cut that thrift cookery was written for: thin, fat-laced, bony, and sold for a fraction of the price of leg or loin, which is why it sits in a book of low-cost recipes rather than in a chapter of roasts. Boning, rolling and tying it is a butcher's trick for making an awkward flat piece behave like a joint — it slices into neat rounds, looks like something, and stretches further than it has any right to. The bed of chopped onion, carrot and turnip sweated in fat before the meat goes in is a common braising base in English and American household cooking, comparable to the French mirepoix and used the same way: as seasoning for the liquid, then thrown out. Canned and bottled tomato was cheap and ordinary in the domestic pantry from the late nineteenth century onward, so the strained-tomato variation is consistent with that period, though it does not date the recipe precisely.