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Dolmas (with Nuts)
2 ONIONS, CHOPPED 3 TABLESPOONS BUTTER 1/2 POUND GROUND LAMB SALT AND PEPPER MINCED PARSLEY 3 TABLESPOONS PINE NUTS (OR CHOPPED ENGLISH WAL- NUTS) CABBAGE LEAVES Slowly fry onions in butter until light brown. Add lamb and continue to fry. Add seasonings and then nuts. Mix well. Mold into rolls 3 inches long, wrap in cabbage leaves, tie with string and cook in embers.
A campfire dish built on the same logic as vine-leaf dolmas, with cabbage standing in as the wrapper and no rice to bulk out the filling. The wrapping is where it succeeds or fails.
- Blanch the leaves firstRaw cabbage leaves crack along the rib when you roll them and the filling escapes into the ashes. Drop whole leaves in boiling water for 2-3 minutes until pliable, then shave down the thick central rib with a knife.
- "Cook in embers" means whatNot flames. Rake a bed of glowing coals with a light coat of grey ash and bury the rolls in it, or set them on a shovel of coals and heap more over the top. Reckon 20-30 minutes for 3-inch rolls, turning once.
- DonenessThe lamb is only partly cooked in the pan and finishes inside the leaves. Ground lamb should reach 160F at the centre of the roll; the outer leaf will likely char and can be peeled away.
- StringUse plain cotton butcher's twine. Synthetic or waxed string can melt in coals, and some string sold as kitchen twine is synthetic.
- Parsley is unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity. About 1/4 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley suits half a pound of lamb; the herb is meant to be tasted, not merely tinted.
- Pine nutsToast them dry in a pan before adding, or they stay soft and pasty in the filling. The walnut substitution the recipe allows gives a more bitter, tannic result and wants slightly more salt.
- YieldHalf a pound of lamb makes roughly six to eight rolls, which is two servings as a main course or four alongside bread and yoghurt.
- FatThree tablespoons of butter for two onions is generous by modern habit but it is doing the work of the missing rice, carrying the filling. Do not drain the pan before rolling.