Lamb's Fry
INGREDIENTS.-1 lb. of lamb's fry, 3 pints of water, egg and bread-crumbs, 1 teaspoonful of chopped parsley, salt and pepper to taste. portion of water, take it out and dry it in Boil the fry for 1/4 hour in the above promix with it a teaspoonful of chopped parsa cloth; grate some bread down finely, ley and a high seasoning of pepper and salt. Brush the fry lightly over with the crumbs and fry for 5 minutes. Serve very yolk of an egg, sprinkle over the breadhot on a napkin in a dish and garnish with plenty of crisped parsley.
TIME.- hour to simmer the fry, 5 minutes to fry it.
SEASONABLE from Easter to Michaelmas.
GREDIENTS. - Lamb, Hashed, and Broiled Blade-bone. (Cold Meat Cookery.)-INshoulder of lamb, pepper and salt to taste, The remains of a cold 2 oz. of butter, about pint of stock or gravy, 1 tablespoonful of shalot vinegar, 3 clusive of the meat, 6d. or 4 pickled gherkins. AVERAGE COST, ex- Take the blade-bone from the shoulder, and cut the meat into collops as neatly as possible. Season the bone with pepper and salt, pour a little oiled butter over it and place it in the oven to warm through. Put the stock into a stewpan, add the ketchup and shalot vinegar and lay in the pieces of lamb. Let these heat gradually through, but do not allow them to boil. Take the blade-bone out of the oven and place it on a gridiron over a sharp fire to brown.
Slice the gherkins, put them into the hash and dish it with the blade-bone in the centre. It may be garnished with croûtons or sippets of toasted bread.
TIME.-Altogether hour.
SEASONABLE. --House lamb, from Christmas to March; grass lamb, from Easter to Michaelmas.
Lamb, Boiled Leg of, à la Béchamel. - INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-Leg of lamb, Béchamel sauce.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. per lb.
Do not choose a very large joint, but one LAMB, ROAST LEG OF. weighing about 5 lbs. Have ready a saucepan of boiling water, into which plunge the lamb; and when it boils up again, draw it to the side of the fire and let the water cool a little. Then stew very gently for about 11 hour, reckoning from the time that the water begins to simmer. Make some Béchamel, dish the lamb, pour the sauce over it and garnish with tufts of boiled cauliflower or carrots. When liked, melted butter may be substituted for the Béchamel; this is a more simple method, but not nearly so nice. Send to table with it some of the sauce in a tureen and boiled cauliflowers or spinach, with whichever vegetable the dish is garnished. TIME.-11 hour after the water simmers.
SEASONABLE from Easter to Michaelmas.
Lamb, Roast Leg of. INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons. -Lamb, a little salt. AVERAGE COST, Is. per lb.
Place the joint at a good distance from the fire at first and baste well the whole time it is cooking. When nearly done, draw it nearer the fire to acquire a nice brown colour. Sprinkle a little fine salt 215 LAMB, ROAST SHOULDER OF. the remaining ingredients, cover the meat with a few more slices of bacon, pour in the stock and simmer very gently for 2 hours; take it up, dry it, strain and reduce the gravy to a glaze, with which glaze the meat and serve it either on stewed peas, spinach, or stewed cucumbers.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE from Easter to Michaelmas.
A Victorian offal dish that survives mainly in Britain and Australia. The method is simple once the jumbled clauses are read in sequence: parboil, dry, brush with egg yolk, coat in seasoned crumbs, then fry briefly.
- What lamb's fry isIn nineteenth-century British cookbooks the term is used loosely, generally for a lamb's pluck and associated offal (liver, sweetbreads, sometimes heart and caul fat); in some British usage, and elsewhere, it means the testicles, while in Australian and New Zealand butchery "lamb's fry" usually means lamb liver alone. Any of these will work with the method; ask your butcher what you are getting, since cooking times differ.
- The order of workSimmer the fry 15 minutes in water, lift out and dry thoroughly in a cloth. Mix fine breadcrumbs with the parsley, pepper and salt. Brush the pieces with egg yolk, press on the crumbs, then fry 5 minutes. Dry meat is the hinge: wet fry sheds its coating in the pan.
- Egg yolk aloneThe ingredients say "egg" but the method specifies the yolk. Yolk carries fat rather than water, so in practice it clings well and colours quickly; brushing rather than dipping should let a single yolk go a long way on a pound of fry.
- The 3 pints of waterThis is only the parboiling liquid and is discarded. Do not read it as a stew: the fry is simmered in the water for a quarter of an hour, not boiled hard, and the liquid plays no further part.
- Frying fat and heatThe recipe names no fat; shallow-frying in butter, dripping or oil is the usual reading. As a modern guide, moderately hot fat (around 350-375F) will crisp the crumbs in the five minutes the recipe allows; longer and liver-based fry turns granular and dry.
- Crisped parsleyFried parsley, not dried. Drop dry sprigs into the hot fat for a few seconds until they stop hissing, then drain. Do this before the fry so the pan is clean.
- "On a napkin in a dish"A folded linen cloth laid in the serving dish to absorb fat, standard for fried food in this period. Kitchen paper under a warm plate does the same job.
- Yield and seasonA pound would stretch to two as a main course or four as a savoury, though the recipe gives no number of servings. "Easter to Michaelmas" means roughly April to 29 September, the old grass-lamb season; the cut is available year round now.
Offal was cheap protein in the Victorian larder and Mrs Beeton's book treats it as a matter of course, giving fry, sweetbreads, kidneys, heart and head their own entries alongside the joints. The seasonal note is the useful historical detail: before refrigerated transport, English cooks distinguished "house lamb" reared indoors and eaten from Christmas to March from "grass lamb" pastured and killed between Easter and Michaelmas, and offal, which spoils fastest of all, was generally bought and used quickly within those windows. The egg-and-crumb treatment here is often described as a nineteenth-century way of making a soft, plain-tasting organ meat palatable at table — crisp shell, high seasoning, and a garnish of fried parsley to signal that it had been cooked with care.