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Roulade of Lamb Braise with Carrots
Procure a tender shoulder of lamb, remove blade bone as well as shank bones. Season inside with teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, one saltspoon grated nutmeg and half teaspoon ground mixed spice. Finely chop two ounces raw, lean veal, place it in mortar with two tablespoons bread crumbs, half bean chopped garlic, half teaspoon chopped parsley, one egg yolk. Season with three saltspoons salt and one saltspoon pepper, then thoroughly pound to a smooth pulp. Moisten with two tablespoons cream, mix well, then evenly spread this force all over inside of shoulder. Roll up and firmly tie around with string. Heat two tablespoons lard in braising pan, add the roulade and cook on fire until a light brown all around. Add eighteen scraped, raw, new carrots, one onion with two cloves stuck in it. Tie in a bunch two branches parsley, one branch chervil, a sprig thyme and a bay leaf, add to the pan, pour in one gill white wine and let reduce until nearly dry, then pour in one pint broth and two gills demi-glace. Season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Cover pan, boil for ten minutes, then set in oven for one hour. Remove, dress lamb on a dish and untie it. Lift up bouquet and onion, skim fat from surface of gravy, boil ten minutes. Pour the contents of pan over the roulade and serve.
A boned, stuffed and braised lamb shoulder in the classic French manner. The recipe assumes a professional larder — demi-glace on hand, a butcher who will bone the shoulder — and measures in saltspoons.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is 3/4 teaspoon. A gill is half a cup: the wine is 1/2 cup, the demi-glace 1 cup, the broth 2 cups.
- Boning the shoulderAsk for a shoulder boned and butterflied but not netted; a boned shoulder will run roughly 3 to 4 lb. Lay it flat and even out the thick spots so the forcemeat spreads in one layer and the roll is uniform.
- "Half bean chopped garlic"Apparently a measure by size rather than by count: a piece of garlic about half the bulk of a bean, which is a very small amount, well under one clove. The forcemeat is meant to be delicately seasoned, not garlicky.
- Mixed spiceBritish mixed spice is a sweet-spice blend, usually built on some combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, clove, ginger and allspice, though proportions varied by maker. It is closer to a sweet-spice mix than to anything savoury; a pinch each of cinnamon, allspice and clove stands in.
- The forcemeatA mortar was the usual way to work veal to a smooth pulp; a food processor does it in seconds, but keep the veal and cream cold or the mixture will break. Two ounces of veal is a thin layer across a whole shoulder, which is the intent — it binds the roll rather than filling it.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock, built over a day or more in a professional kitchen. Substitute a good commercial demi-glace, or reduce 3 cups of dark veal or beef stock to 1 cup; a stock cube dissolved in water will read as salty rather than glossy.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. A braise of this size wants a moderate oven, around 325F, which will hold the liquid at a bare tremble for the hour specified. Check the internal temperature at the centre of the roll rather than trusting the clock: because the centre is a raw chopped-veal-and-egg forcemeat, take it to 160F rather than treating it as a pink roast.
- The carrotsEighteen new carrots means young, finger-sized ones, added whole and scraped rather than peeled. Full-grown supermarket carrots cut into batons will take the same hour; add them whole and they will still be firm when the lamb is ready.
- Finishing the gravyThe recipe calls for skimming the fat before the final ten-minute boil, and it is worth doing thoroughly: reducing demi-glace takes up rendered lamb fat readily and the sauce turns cloudy and heavy. Rest the liquid off the heat for a few minutes first so the fat rises, or skim it cold if you have time.
- YieldServes six to eight. Let the roll rest ten minutes before untying and slicing, or the forcemeat spiral will slump.
Roulade is simply French for something rolled, and the technique here — bone a cheap shoulder, line it with a fine forcemeat, roll, tie and braise — is often said to be the nineteenth-century restaurant answer to the problem of making a working cut look like a centrepiece. The veal-and-cream stuffing is close kin to a godiveau, though a true godiveau is bound with suet rather than cream, and it belongs to the same forcemeat family used for quenelles; its job is textural: it holds the spiral together under the knife. The demi-glace in the braising liquid is the tell that this comes out of a professional brigade kitchen, where a cook could reasonably be expected to ladle out reduced brown sauce without thinking about it. Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York before compiling books like this one, and his household volumes carry the assumptions of that kitchen into the domestic one largely unedited — hence a recipe that specifies eighteen carrots to the piece but never once names an oven temperature, since the cook was expected to know his range.