Home › Meats › Roast Lamb, with Mint Sauce
Roast Lamb, with Mint Sauce
If the roast is from the breast, make a stuffing as directed for a rolled shoulder of mutton and fill the place made for the stuffing. Wipe the meat, dredge with salt, pepper and flour, and roast on a rack, basting often and allowing fifteen minutes to a pound. If more fat is required for basting, use butter. Serve hot on a platter with mint sauce. See Chapter on Sauces for Fish, Meats, Poultry and Game.
The Butterick book assumes you know your oven and your butcher, so it gives neither a temperature nor a cut weight. Both are worth pinning down before you start.
- TemperatureNo oven setting is given because the book expects a coal or early gas range judged by hand. Roast lamb at 325-350F throughout, or start at 450F for 15 minutes to set the crust and drop to 325F for the remainder.
- Fifteen minutes to a poundThat timing at 325-350F lands a leg or shoulder around medium, and a boned, stuffed, rolled breast rather more done. Modern practice is to ignore the clock and pull the meat at 130-135F internal for medium-rare, 140-145F for medium, resting 15 minutes before carving.
- Breast of lambA fatty, layered cut with the ribs in. The "place made for the stuffing" means a boned breast, either pocketed or opened flat, stuffed and tied into a roll. Ask the butcher to bone it; the bones are worth keeping for the gravy.
- Basting and added butterA breast renders plenty of its own fat and will not need the butter. A lean leg might, though frequent basting does little for browning and costs oven heat every time the door opens. Every 20-30 minutes is sufficient.
- Dredging with flourFlour over the salted, peppered surface browns into a thin crust and thickens the pan drippings for gravy. It scorches at high heat, so it belongs with the moderate-oven method rather than a hard initial sear.
- Mint sauceThe book means the English sauce: chopped mint steeped in hot vinegar with sugar, poured thin and sharp. It is not mint jelly, which is a later American substitution and much sweeter.
- YieldA boned and stuffed breast of about 2 lb serves three to four. A bone-in leg of 5-6 lb serves six to eight, allowing roughly 12 oz bone-in weight per person.
The Butterick Publishing Company sold dress patterns, and its cook book of 1911 was aimed at the same readership: women running a household on a middle-class budget with limited help. That accounts for the breast of lamb here, one of the cheapest cuts on the carcass and a stretch of fat and cartilage that only becomes a company dish once boned, stuffed and rolled to look like a proper roast. The cross-reference to the rolled shoulder of mutton is the book's habit throughout, treating stuffings and sauces as modules to be reused rather than rewritten. Mint sauce with lamb is an English inheritance, generally traced to the long tradition of serving sharp vinegar-based sauces with fatty roast meats; American books of this period print it almost automatically alongside lamb, though the sweeter mint jelly later became a common substitute on this side of the Atlantic.