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June 1
Menu: Curried Lobster; Boiled Stuffed Leg of Lamb; Potatoes; Scalloped Sweet Corn; Cherry Salad; Frozen Watermelon; Coffee; 2 Boiled Stuffed Leg of Lamb-Have small, tender leg of lamb, and remove bone. Make forcemeat of 1/2 pound fresh mushrooms cut in pieces, 1/2 cup chopped boiled ham, ½ cup breadcrumbs, and 2 tablespoons melted Crisco. Season with pepper and salt, and put into the lamb in place of removed bone. Tie it up well, wrap in piece of cheesecloth, and boil in salted water, having juice 1/2 lemon, 1 onion, and few branches of parsley in it. Serve with currant jelly sauce; that is, 4 tablespoons butter melted together with 1½ tumbler currant jelly and 1/2 glass white wine.
A boned leg of lamb, stuffed and poached in an aromatic court bouillon — a technique that has largely fallen out of English-language cooking but produces very moist meat. The original gives no times, temperatures or yield, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Simmer, never boilA rolling boil will squeeze the muscle fibers and force the stuffing out through the seams. Bring the water up, then hold it at a bare shiver, around 180-190F, for the whole cooking time.
- Timing and donenessFigure roughly 20-25 minutes per pound after the water comes back up to temperature — about 1 hour 40 minutes to 2 hours for a 5 lb boned leg. Whole-muscle lamb is safe at 145F; if you cook on until the centre of the stuffing reads 160F, the meat around it will be well past pink.
- Tumblers and glassesA tumbler is commonly taken as about 8 fluid ounces, so 1½ tumblers of currant jelly is roughly 12 oz — most of a standard jar. The book does not define 'glass'; period wine-glass measures generally run 2 to 4 fluid ounces, so half a glass of wine is somewhere between 2 tablespoons and a scant quarter cup.
- CriscoCrisco in 1913 was hydrogenated cottonseed oil; today's product is a reformulated blend. The 2 tablespoons in the forcemeat are there only to bind and enrich; butter or olive oil does the same job with more flavor.
- Boning the legAsk the butcher to tunnel-bone it rather than butterfly it, so you have a cavity to fill. Take the bone home and add it to the poaching water — the original throws away a good deal of flavor by omitting it.
- The forcemeat is raw going inSliced raw mushrooms will shed a surprising amount of liquid into the cavity. Sweat them dry in a pan first, cool them, then mix with the ham and crumbs; the stuffing will slice instead of slumping.
- Tying and wrappingSew or truss the opening closed before wrapping in cheesecloth, and tie the cloth at both ends like a bolster. Without that the stuffing works loose and clouds the poaching liquid.
- The sauceMelt the jelly and butter together over low heat and add the wine off the boil; hard boiling breaks the emulsion and drives the jelly toward candy. It is very sweet by modern taste — a spoonful of mustard or the grated zest of the lemon you juiced brings it back into balance.
- YieldA 5 lb boned leg with stuffing serves six to eight. Rest it 15 minutes in the cloth before untying and slicing crosswise so each slice shows a core of forcemeat.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, a cookery editor hired by Procter & Gamble to demonstrate that their new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, introduced in 1911, could do everything butter and lard did. The "Calendar of Dinners" section that this dish belongs to assigns a menu to every day of the year, which is why the recipe carries the date June 2 and sits under a heading about coffee ‟rom the pages run continuously through each day's courses. Boiled leg of lamb or mutton served with red currant jelly is an English inheritance, and the jelly-and-wine sauce here is a distant cousin of Cumberland sauce, which combines jelly with port, citrus and mustard rather than butter. Note that the sauce calls for butter outright — a small concession in a book whose entire purpose was to sell shortening.