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Boiled Leg of Lamb
Sprinkle a leg of lamb with salt, place it in a bowl with enough soft water to cover, add a few drops of vinegar or lemon juice, and let the lamb steep for an hour. Then dry it, dredge with flour, wrap it in a piece of linen, put it in a saucepan with a bunch of sweet herbs and water to cover, and boil it for an hour and a half, more or less, according to the size of the joint. When cooked remove the cloth, place the lamb on a hot dish, garnish with parsley and thin slices of lemon, and serve with a sauceboatful of caper sauce.
A late-Victorian hotel treatment of a joint most modern cooks would roast. The method works, but two words in it need translating: "boil" here means a bare simmer, and the linen wrapping is doing real work.
- Never let it boilA rolling boil will squeeze and toughen the muscle fibres and leave the outside stringy before the centre is done. Bring the pot up, then hold it at 180-190F, with the surface barely trembling.
- The linen wrapThe floured cloth keeps the surface pale and prevents the flour dredge from clouding the cooking liquid. Cheesecloth doubled over, or a clean cotton napkin tied with kitchen twine, does the same job; skip it and the lamb still cooks, it just looks greyer.
- Soft waterNineteenth-century kitchens distinguished hard well water from soft rain or cistern water, which was thought to keep meat tender and white. Tap water is fine.
- Timing by weight"An hour and a half, more or less" is left deliberately open; the recipe tells you to judge by the size of the joint. Reckon on about 20 minutes per pound at a simmer, and check with a thermometer rather than the clock: 135-140F at the thickest point, away from the bone, gives pink lamb; 150F gives it cooked through.
- A bunch of sweet herbsA typical bundle was parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf, sometimes with marjoram or savoury, tied together so it could be lifted out whole. Add a halved onion, a carrot and a few peppercorns to the pot and the cooking liquid becomes a usable broth.
- Caper sauceOscar assumes you know it: a white sauce or velouté built on some of the lamb liquor, finished with drained capers and a squeeze of lemon. Made with the cooking broth rather than milk it is far better.
- SaltThe initial sprinkle plus an unsalted pot leaves the meat bland. Salt the cooking water like pasta water, or the flavour ends up entirely in the sauceboat.
- YieldA bone-in leg of this size serves eight generously, with enough left for the cold table the following day.
Boiled leg of mutton or lamb with caper sauce was a fixture of British and Anglo-American dining well before Oscar Tschirky set it down for the Waldorf, and it survived on hotel menus because it suited a large kitchen: a joint held gently in liquid can wait, can be carved to order, and yields both broth and a cold roast for the next service. Capers, pickled flower buds shipped from the Mediterranean, were the standard partner, and the pairing is old enough that English cookery writers of the eighteenth century already treat it as the obvious sauce for a boiled joint. The linen wrapping and the insistence on soft water belong to a period when a pale, unmarked surface was considered the mark of a properly boiled joint, and when the mineral content of the household water supply was something a cook genuinely thought about.