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Roast Lamb in Tomato
Make one quart of tomato sauce.
Slice cold roast lamb thin as for the table and just before serving place it in the boiling sauce. Cook just long enough to heat the meat, and serve. The secret of making an inviting dish of already cooked meat is in not forgetting that it is cooked enough. It should only be heated through.
A leftovers dish that lives or dies on one instruction, which the original states outright: the lamb is already cooked, so it only needs warming.
- The hingeThe original drops the slices into boiling sauce, but only for as long as it takes to heat them; with the pan barely at a simmer, or off the heat, 1-2 minutes is enough. Held at a boil, thin reheated slices lose their remaining juices and go grey and stringy.
- Slice cold, serve hotThe meat is cold simply because it is yesterday's roast, though that helps: a chilled roast slices thin and cleanly where a warm one tears. "Thin as for the table" suggests something around 1/8 inch, thin enough to heat almost instantly.
- One quart of sauceFour cups is generous; on modern practice it would carry the sliced meat off a small leg or shoulder, though the recipe specifies neither a weight of lamb nor a number of servings. Halve the sauce if you are only using the tail end of a roast.
- Tomato sauce, 1911 styleTomato sauce -- Period tomato sauces of this type were generally roux-thickened, made with stewed or canned tomatoes, strained and aromatically seasoned. Any well-seasoned smooth tomato sauce works; keep it loose enough to coat rather than cling, since it will thicken slightly as it sits on the platter.
- Season for lambThe sauce carries the whole dish. Rosemary, a strip of lemon zest, a little garlic or a spoonful of the congealed roasting juices from the lamb all give it something to hold onto.
- ServingWarm the platter first: cold china will pull the heat straight back out of thin slices. Rice, mashed potato or macaroni suit it.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911), compiled by Helena Judson for the pattern company's publishing arm, was likely aimed at a household of the sort often described as buying one large roast and making it appear at three or four meals. Whole chapters of period cookery are devoted to what the books call "warmed-over" or "re-heated" dishes — hash, croquettes, mince, scallops and sauced slices like this one — because a joint of lamb was an expense and throwing away half of it was unthinkable. What dates the recipe is not the technique but the frankness of its little sermon. The growing availability of canned tomatoes by the 1900s may be part of what made a quart of tomato sauce a casual weekday proposition rather than a late-summer one.