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Shoulder of Lamb, Bretonne
Remove blade bone from a shoulder of lamb, season with a good teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, fold up and tie with string. Place the meat on a small roasting pan with a sliced onion and bean of garlic around, lightly baste the lamb with melted butter and pour two tablespoons broth or water into pan. Set in oven to roast for one hour and fifteen minutes, turning and basting once in a while with its own gravy, remove, untie and dress on a hot dish. Dress a beans bretonne around the lamb and serve.
A plain French roast that assumes you already know two things the text never says: the oven temperature and what beans bretonne are. Both are worth settling before you start.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, which in a book of this vintage means the cook was trusted to judge it. Roast at 350-375F; a shoulder is fatty and forgiving, and a hotter oven will scorch the onion and the small amount of pan liquid.
- "Bean of garlic"A literal rendering of the French gousse d'ail - one clove, thrown in with the onion. Not a bean, and not a whole head.
- Timing and weightA boned, rolled lamb shoulder runs 3-5 lb. An hour and a quarter suits the smaller end; go by internal temperature at the centre of the roll - about 145F for pink, 160F and above if you want the connective tissue in a shoulder to soften properly.
- Boning the shoulderThe blade bone lifts out with a boning knife along its flat faces; any butcher will do it on request. Season the inside surface as well as the outside before rolling, and tie at 1-inch intervals so the roll holds its shape.
- The pan liquidTwo tablespoons is deliberately small - this is a roast, not a braise. Check it once or twice and add a splash more if the onion begins to blacken, since the fond in the pan is the whole of the gravy.
- Beans bretonneDried white haricot or cannellini beans, cooked soft, then finished in butter with chopped onion, garlic and a little tomato and the roasting juices. Start them well ahead: dried beans want an overnight soak and an hour or more of simmering.
- RestingUntie and carve after 10-15 minutes out of the oven. Cutting the strings straight from the pan lets the roll relax and the juices run out onto the platter rather than staying in the meat.
- YieldA boned shoulder of this size serves four to six with the beans.
"A la bretonne" is one of the fixed garnishes of classical French cooking: white haricot beans bound with an onion-and-tomato sauce, the name generally traced to Brittany, where the beans have long been a staple field crop. The pairing with mutton or lamb is old enough that the French haricot de mouton - a stew whose name almost certainly comes from the verb harigoter, to cut up, rather than from the bean - was for centuries confused with it, and the beans eventually attached themselves to the dish anyway. Its appearance here reflects a repertoire in which the standard was French and a cook was expected to know the garnish by name without being told what went into it.