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Ribs of Spring Lamb, Roasted
Neatly trim a good-sized rib of spring lamb. Lay it in a small, lightly buttered roasting pan. Season with a teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon white pepper, well rubbed in all over. Pour a tablespoon hot water into the pan. Spread half ounce butter over the ribs. Set in a brisk oven to roast for ten minutes, then turn it over, baste it well and let roast for twenty-five minutes more. Dress on a hot dish. Skim the fat from the gravy. Strain the gravy over the lamb. Decorate the dish with fresh watercress and serve with a gill of mint sauce in a saucebowl separately.
MINT SAUCE (for one quart).
Clean and wash well a bunch of very fresh, sound mint, drain well, then pick off all the leaves from the stalks and mince them exceedingly fine. Place the mint in a large bowl with three ounces fine sugar, three-quarters of a pint good vinegar, half pint cold water and one tablespoon salt. Mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon, then place in a large bottle or jar, tightly covered, and use as required, always being careful to thoroughly shake the bottle or jar just before serving.
A short, hot roast of a rack of lamb, plus a keeping mint sauce that makes far more than one dinner needs. A few of the terms and quantities need translating.
- "A brisk oven"A hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-450F. The whole cooking time is 35 minutes, which points to high heat on a small rack.
- What cut this isA "good-sized rib of spring lamb" is most likely a rack, roughly 7-8 ribs, 1.5 to 2 lb. Ask for it chined and the fat cap trimmed to a thin layer.
- A gillHalf a cup, here of mint sauce for the table. The sauce recipe itself yields a full quart, so one roast uses about an eighth of it.
- Doneness over timingThirty-five minutes at high heat will take a 2 lb rack past pink. Cook to an internal temperature at the thickest point rather than to the clock, and rest it 10 minutes before carving; the recipe offers no temperature guide.
- The tablespoon of hot waterMost likely there to keep the pan juices from scorching in the first minutes before the lamb renders its own fat. In a modern heavy pan it is still worth adding, and worth topping up if the pan goes dry.
- Mint sauce proportionsThree ounces sugar is a scant half cup; three-quarters of a pint vinegar is 1.5 cups and half a pint water is 1 cup. Use a plain malt or cider vinegar. The tablespoon of salt seasons the sauce; the vinegar is what preserves it.
- Keeping the sauceThe vinegar keeps it for a good while in a tightly covered jar, best in the fridge, but the mint will darken within a day or two. Made fresh in smaller quantity it is greener; the quart batch is for a household serving lamb repeatedly through the season.
- YieldA single rack serves two generously, three at a stretch. Double the roast rather than the sauce.
Mint sauce with lamb is one of the oldest fixed pairings in English cooking, generally traced to the sharp, sweetened vinegar sauces of the medieval and early modern table, where acid was used to cut fatty meat much as verjuice or sorrel was elsewhere. By the nineteenth century it had hardened into ritual: lamb at Easter meant mint sauce, and cookbooks routinely gave it in bottled quantity. "Spring lamb" here still meant genuinely seasonal young meat rather than a year-round supermarket cut.