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Leg of Lamb, Jardiniere
Have a nice, tender, rather small leg of lamb. Trim the handle bone neatly. Rub half ounce butter or good fat all over it. Season with a light tablespoon salt and a teaspoon white pepper well distributed. Place it in a roasting pan. Pour four tablespoons cold water into the pan and roast in the oven for one hour, basting it once in a while. Remove it from the oven, dress on a hot dish, skim off the fat from the gravy and strain the gravy over the meat. Dress the jardiniere all around the leg and serve.
A bare-bones classical roast that assumes the cook already knows two things the text never states: how hot the oven is and what a jardiniere consists of. Fill in both and it works exactly as written.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, which was normal when ranges had no dials. Roast at 425F for the first 15 minutes to colour the surface, then drop to 350F for the remainder.
- One hour is a short roastAn hour total only suits a genuinely small leg, around 4 lb, and should leave it near medium-rare, though this depends on the oven and the shape of the joint. Go by an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part away from the bone: 130-135F for pink, 145F for medium. A 6-7 lb leg needs closer to 1 1/2 hours.
- SaltA "light tablespoon" of salt is roughly 2 1/2 teaspoons of table salt, or a bit more than a tablespoon of coarse kosher salt, for a whole leg. That is a defensible amount for 4 lb of meat, but distribute it as instructed rather than dumping it in one place.
- The handle boneTrimming it means frenching the shank: scraping the last few inches of bone clean so it can be gripped for carving. Any butcher will do this on request.
- Water in the panThe four tablespoons of cold water are there to keep the drippings from scorching, not to steam the meat. Check partway through and add another splash if the pan runs dry, or the gravy will taste burnt.
- What the jardiniere isA classical jardiniere garnish is spring vegetables cut to uniform batons or dice and cooked separately, each kept distinct: carrots, turnips, green beans, peas, sometimes cauliflower or flageolets, tossed in butter and arranged in groups around the meat. Filippini expected the cook to know it; nothing in this recipe produces it.
- Resting and the gravyLet the leg stand 15 minutes on the hot dish before carving. That is also when you skim and strain the pan juices, which will be thin, unthickened jus in the French manner rather than a flour gravy.
- YieldA small leg of this size serves about four to six, stretching further with the vegetable garnish.
Jardiniere is French for a woman gardener, and as a culinary term it means simply "in the gardener's style" -- fresh vegetables, cut neatly, cooked separately so each keeps its own colour and texture, then banked around a roast rather than stewed with it. The garnish belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire that dominated hotel and restaurant cooking in America, and it is the kind of shorthand Alexander Filippini could use without explanation: he had spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, where a cook who did not know a jardiniere from a bouquetiere would not have lasted. The recipe's terseness is characteristic of the period's professional writing, where the roast itself is treated as the easy part and the reader is trusted to supply the oven judgment and the garnish.