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Lamb Ragout and Ravioli
(Italy.) Boil 2 pounds of the neck of lamb and 3 quarts of water, salt, pepper, parsley, a turnip, and 2 onions, sliced and cooked in butter. Simmer for 3 hours, cut the meat into small pieces, reduce the broth by rapid boiling, and add 1 dozen ravioli--see recipe--previously poached in broth. Serve the meat garnished with these, and the strained broth, in a bowl.
A two-in-one dish: a long-simmered lamb neck gives both a clear broth and a platter of meat, with ravioli doing double duty as garnish and starch. The instruction that matters is the reduction — 3 quarts of water on 2 pounds of meat is a very thin start, and the broth is only good if you boil it down hard at the end.
- Lamb neckNeck is sold as whole neck or as neck slices (sometimes labelled lamb neck fillet, which is leaner and different). Bone-in neck is what you want here; the collagen is the point, and it is what makes the reduced broth taste of something.
- Quantities3 quarts is about 2.8 litres. Expect to reduce it by half or more, to roughly 5-6 cups, before it has any body. The original salts at the outset; if you follow it, go light, since reducing by half will concentrate whatever you put in.
- "Simmer for 3 hours"Read this as a bare simmer with the surface barely moving; a hard boil for three hours will shred the meat. Three hours is right for bone-in neck; check at two and a half.
- The onions in butterSoftening the sliced onions in butter first is not decorative — it is the only browning in the dish. Take them to golden, not pale, and add the butter and all to the pot.
- SkimNeck is fatty. Skim during the first twenty minutes and again after reducing, or chill the strained broth and lift the fat off in a sheet.
- The ravioliThe original cross-references a pasta recipe elsewhere in the book. Any small meat or cheese ravioli works; poach them in a ladleful of the lamb broth rather than plain water so they carry the flavour, and do it at the last minute so they do not swell and split.
- ServingAs written: the strained broth in a bowl, the meat on a dish garnished with the ravioli. Two pounds of bone-in neck feeds three, generously two.
What is described is close to a domestic bollito or lesso: cheap bone-in meat and root vegetables simmered until both the broth and the meat are worth eating, then served as two things at once, the brodo and the boiled meat. Filled pasta floated in broth is long-standing practice in northern Italy, Emilia above all. The use of neck rather than a prime cut suggests an everyday dish: lamb and mutton neck were among the least expensive cuts, and a book aimed at home cooks would assume no apology was needed for it.