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Leg of Lamb, Boulangere
With a cleaver lightly beat a medium leg of lamb all around, insert a small piece of sound garlic under the meat of the handle bone, season it all over with a tespoon of salt well rubbed in, half teaspoon pepper, and lay the leg in a small roasting pan. Place around it twelve small, raw peeled potatoes and twelve small, peeled white onions, lightly baste with melted butter, pour half gill water into the pan, set in the oven to roast for one hour, turning leg, potatoes and onions once in a while. Remove, dress leg on a hot dish, arrange the garnishing around. Pour half gill white wine into pan, boil on the range for five minutes, pour it over the lamb, sprinkle a half teaspoon chopped parsley over and serve.
A straightforward one-pan roast in the boulangère manner, with the vegetables cooking in the meat drippings rather than separately. The original gives no oven temperature and a timing that assumes a smaller leg than most butchers sell today.
- Oven heatNo temperature is stated, which in a book of this date means the cook was expected to judge it. A hot-to-quick oven of about 425F suits this method: it browns the potatoes and onions in the fat while the leg roasts.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup — first of water in the pan, later of white wine for the deglaze. Both are small amounts by design; this is a roast, not a braise.
- One hour is for a small legA modern bone-in leg runs 6 to 8 lb and will need closer to 1 1/2 hours. Cook to internal temperature rather than the clock: 130-135F at the thickest part, away from bone, for medium-rare, then rest 15 minutes. The original hour would suit a 4 lb leg or a boned and tied half-leg.
- The handle boneThat is the shank end. Slitting the flesh alongside it and pushing in a garlic clove perfumes the whole joint as the fat renders; several cloves slivered into the fat side do more good still.
- Potatoes and onionsThey must be genuinely small — walnut-sized new potatoes and boiling onions of about an inch — or they will still be hard when the lamb is done. Larger potatoes should be cut to that size. Turn them in the fat rather than merely turning the leg, or the tops dry out.
- Beating with the cleaverThe flat of a cleaver against a bone-in leg does little for tenderness; it was probably meant to break down surface sinew and settle the shape in the pan. It can be skipped. Scoring the fat in a shallow diamond pattern is more useful.
- The pan saucePour off most of the fat before adding the wine, or the sauce will be greasy. Five minutes of hard boiling with the browned bits scraped up gives a thin, sharp jus — this is not a thickened gravy and should not be treated as one.
- YieldA leg of this size serves six to eight, with the twelve potatoes and twelve onions divided among them.
Boulangère is customarily glossed as "baker's wife," the word being the feminine of boulanger, and the name is traditionally said to preserve an arrangement of French town life: households without an oven of their own were said to carry the Sunday joint, set over sliced potatoes and onions, to the neighbourhood baker, who let it cook in the bread oven's falling heat after the morning's loaves came out. The potatoes catching the drippings are the whole point of the dish, and the classic version buries them in stock beneath the meat rather than roasting them loose in the pan as here. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its French entries tend to be trimmed for American kitchens with their own ranges — hence a straight roast with garnish rather than the layered gratin of potatoes the name properly implies.