Roast Lamb
Wipe meat with damp cloth. Put one or two thin slices of onion on top; season with salt and pepper. Put into roasting pan in hot oven and roast for about one hour and a quarter. Reduce the heat after lamb has been roasting about 20 minutes. Serve on hot platter with brown gravy or mint sauce.
A bare-bones roasting method of the kind printed when every cook was assumed to know the rest. The two things it leaves out are the size of the joint and any test for doneness.
- Oven temperaturesA "hot oven" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. "Reduce the heat" is not specified; a moderate 325-350F for the remainder is the usual modern reading.
- The missing weightAn hour and a quarter total would suit a fairly small joint, perhaps 4 to 5 lb — a small leg, a shoulder, or a rolled breast — though the recipe itself gives no weight. A larger leg of 6-7 lb will need considerably longer, in the region of an hour and three-quarters at the reduced heat.
- Judge by temperature, not the clockThis is the instruction the original cannot give. Use a thermometer in the thickest part away from bone: 130-135F for medium rare, 140-145F for medium. Recipes of this era often ran to what we would call well done, which dries out modern lean lamb.
- Rest before carvingTen to fifteen minutes under loose foil. The recipe's "hot platter" is standard practice for any roast of the period, and it is still worth doing.
- The onion slicesThey are there to scent the fat and flavour the drippings, not to be served. They will darken and may scorch; lift them out before making gravy if they have gone bitter.
- Brown gravyMade from the pan: pour off most of the fat, stir a tablespoon of flour into the remaining fat and browned bits, cook a minute, then whisk in about a cup of stock or water.
- Mint sauceThe English sort — chopped mint, a spoonful of sugar, and vinegar or hot water to steep, made an hour ahead. Not the jelly.
- YieldA 4-5 lb bone-in joint serves four to six.
The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of the great American promotional cookbooks of the early twentieth century. The entry here is brief — no weight, no thermometer, no doneness cue — a roast being largely assumed knowledge. The choice offered at the end, brown gravy or mint sauce, marks the two traditions available to an American cook of the period: pan gravy in the general Anglo-American manner, or the sharp sweet-vinegar mint sauce inherited from English practice, where mint's supposed affinity for lamb is usually traced to the herb's long use as a digestive accompaniment to rich meat. Searing hot and then reducing the heat, as directed here, was standard advice for decades on the belief that it "sealed in the juices" — the sealing turns out not to happen, but the method survives because the initial blast browns the fat and skin well.</br>