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Lamb, Shoulder of, Stuffed
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.- Shoulder of lamb, forcemeat, trimmings of veal or beef, 2 onions, 1/2 head of celery, 1 faggot of savoury herbs, a few slices of fat bacon, 1 quart of stock. AVERAGE COST, 4s. 6d.
Take the blade-bone out of a shoulder of lamb, fill up its place with forcemeat and sew it up with coarse thread. Put it into a stewpan with a few slices of bacon under and over the lamb and add the remaining ingredients. Stew very gently for rather more than 2 hours. Reduce the gravy, with which glaze the meat and serve with peas , stewed cucumbers, or sorrel sauce.
TIME. Rather more than 2 hours.
SEASONABLE from Easter to Michaelmas.
A braise, not a roast: the shoulder cooks gently in stock under a blanket of bacon, and the cooking liquid becomes the glaze. Almost everything here translates directly; the vocabulary is the main obstacle.
- ForcemeatBeeton's standard veal forcemeat is breadcrumbs, chopped suet or bacon fat, lemon zest, parsley and herbs, bound with egg. Any bread-based stuffing works, but keep it fairly firm — a loose stuffing leaks out of the pocket during two hours of moist cooking.
- Boning the shoulderRemoving the blade bone cleanly takes practice. Ask the butcher for a shoulder boned but not rolled, leaving the pocket intact. Sew with butcher's twine, not the "coarse thread" of the original, and pull the stitches snug.
- A faggot of savoury herbsA bundle of herbs tied with string — parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf is the usual reading. Tie it so it can be fished out before the gravy is reduced.
- Quart of stockAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 5 US cups. The recipe gives no liquid level; in a close-fitting stewpan a quart will generally come partway up the meat rather than cover it, which suits a gentle stew.
- Trimmings of veal or beefThese are there for body and gelatine, not for eating. A veal knuckle, a few beef bones or a split pig's trotter does the same job; without them the reduced gravy will be thinner and slower to take on a glazing consistency.
- Heat and timing"Stew very gently" means a bare tremble, no rolling boil. The original works on the stovetop; if you prefer, a covered pot in a low oven (around 300F) will hold that heat more steadily than a burner. Two hours suits a 3-4 lb boned shoulder; larger cuts want closer to three, and the meat is ready when a skewer meets no resistance.
- Reducing to a glazeStrain the liquid, skim the fat hard, then boil it down until it coats a spoon. The bacon and stock are already salty, so season only at the end.
- Serving and yieldSix portions as written. Peas and sorrel sauce are both spring accompaniments; sorrel is sharply acidic and does the work a lemon or mint sauce would do now. Rest the joint ten minutes and cut the twine before carving across the grain.
- The cost line4s 6d is Victorian pre-decimal money — four shillings and sixpence — and gives a sense of the dish's standing in a middle-class household rather than any usable modern figure.
Shoulder was the cheaper of the two prime lamb joints, awkward to carve and well supplied with connective tissue, and boning, stuffing and stewing it turns a difficult cut into something that carves in neat slices and stretches with forcemeat to feed more people — though shoulder was roasted as well. The seasonal note, "from Easter to Michaelmas," marks the old English lamb year: young grass-fed lamb from spring through to 29 September, one of the quarter days on which accounts were settled. Sorrel sauce, now nearly vanished from British cookery, was one of the acidic partners to lamb and veal in England and France, alongside mint and lemon. The technique — bacon beneath and above, aromatics, a bed of bones, long gentle cooking, then reducing the liquor to a glaze — is straightforward French braising vocabulary, absorbed into English domestic cookery through the professional kitchens of the nineteenth century.