Home › The World's Kitchen › Roast Leg of Lamb, Mint Sauce
Roast Leg of Lamb, Mint Sauce
Procure a medium-sized, tender leg of lamb, from five and a half to six pounds. Season with a tablespoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, well rubbed all around. Place the leg in a roasting pan, pour in three tablespoons hot fat and three tablespoons cold water. Place in a hot oven to roast for one hour and twenty minutes, taking care to baste it quite frequently with its own gravy. Remove it, dress on a hot dish, skim the fat from the surface of the gravy, then strain the gravy over the leg. Decorate with a little watercress and serve with mint sauce separately.
A straightforward high-heat roast that assumes an experienced hand at the oven door. The one thing worth adding is a thermometer.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperature; in cookery of this period a hot oven is generally taken as roughly 400-450F. The recipe never asks you to drop the heat, so hold it there for the whole time. A leg roasted this way browns hard on the outside, which is the point.
- Timing and donenessOne hour twenty minutes for a 5.5-6 lb bone-in leg works out to roughly 14 minutes per pound, which lands pink in the centre. Pull it at 130-135F at the thickest part, away from the bone, for medium-rare; add about 10 minutes if you want it at 145F.
- Rest the meatNo resting period is given, as is common in recipes of this kind. Give the leg 15 minutes on the hot dish before carving, and use that time to skim and strain the gravy.
- The water in the panThe three tablespoons of cold water most likely serve to keep the drippings from scorching at high heat rather than to steam the meat. Top up with a spoonful more if the pan looks dry partway through.
- Hot fatThis meant rendered beef suet, lard or drippings in the period kitchen. Any neutral oil or clarified butter does the same job.
- White pepperProbably specified so no dark flecks show on the pale surface of the meat and gravy. Black pepper works, though it both looks and tastes slightly different.
- Legs are bigger nowWhole bone-in supermarket legs frequently run 7-9 lb. Buy to the stated weight if you can, and go by internal temperature rather than the clock.
- Mint sauceGiven separately in books of this kind: chopped mint steeped in vinegar with a little sugar, thin and sharp, not the thick jelly sold in jars. Make it an hour ahead so the mint softens and the sugar dissolves.
- YieldA leg this size serves six to eight.
Roast leg of lamb with a thin vinegar-and-mint sauce is the English Sunday dinner in its most recognisable form, and the pairing of mint with lamb is generally traced back through several centuries of British cookery, with vinegar-based mint sauce well established by the eighteenth century. Its appearance in a book of this period reflects how continental-trained chefs working in American hotels and restaurants catalogued national dishes side by side, each reduced to a short professional method: procure, season, roast, dress, garnish, serve the sauce apart.