Roast leg of lamb - a lucky dip
- rosemary
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
"How to roast a leg of lamb to rival even your mum's"
Donna Hay Magazine
Yet again my heart sank when I opened a page at random in my randomly chosen cookbook - Issue 10 of the Donna Hay Magazine - now discontinued. These days I ask David to choose my lucky dip books because my choices are not really random, for even with my eyes closed I sort of know what book I'm picking. He, on the other hand, has no idea. Issue no. 10 is a winter edition I think, and so a roast is an obvious choice for discussion. But honestly what is there to say about roast lamb I thought and put it aside, picking it up every now and then to try and drum up some enthusiasm, but finding none. I even tried to cheat with opening other pages, with no better enthusiasm. Until today.
Maybe it's because the sun is shining, and I have already been for a walk because we had to get up early for the heater repair man - no result on that front - we have to get a new one. So it was pretty cold - crisp and bright and energising. Maybe that's why when I looked at that picture above again, in all it's perfect Donna Hay style brilliance, I decided to tackle the subject from the traditional point of view. After all she does call it Traditional roast leg of lamb with rosemary and garlic. And as I began my internet wanderings, I, of course, found all sorts of other little sideways things.
I first began with that rosemary and garlic thing. There are countless recipes out there with that combination, including from Delia, that most English of cooks with her Roast lamb with garlic and rosemary and rosemary and onion sauce - not that it is her only recipe for roast leg of lamb. However, the roast legs of lamb that I remember from my own childhood - my mum's - and my grandmother's too, did not use rosemary - in fact I don't remember using rosemary in anything - and garlic was just an unknown. Garlic was not used for roasting lamb until we started cooking lamb like the French. To whom I shall return in another side trip.
No, like Jamie - Best roast leg of lamb with proper home-made mint sauce we served our roast lamb with mint sauce - sadly almost always from a jar of concentrated mint sauce, that we would 'water' down with malt vinegar. I have a jar in my reserve drawer right now, but the Australians seem to put a bit too much sugar in theirs.
His mint sauce is pretty traditional - just chopped mint mixed with sugar and vinegar - and I have made this kind of sauce in the past, but when I was following recipes it was always too watery for me. And interestingly Jamie too goes for the rosemary and garlic, which does seem to have triumphed as the classic, nay traditional way of serving an anglo kind of roast lamb.
Before I leave mint sauce however, Donna Hay in my lucky dip magazine had a recipe for a tangy mint sauce, which sounded as if it might be worth a try some time:
"Place 1/2 cup apple juice, 1/4 cup water, 1 tablespoon wholegrain mustard and 1 tablespoon white wine vinegar in a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer for 3 minutes. Stir through 1/2 cup shredded mint and allow to stand for 5 minutes. Makes approximately 3/4 cup."
Which brings me to another minor diversion. Anglo/British. I am steadfastly ignoring all the multicultural ways you can roast lamb, so have therefore been looking at British recipes. Which reminded me that somewhere in my internet ramblings yesterday I came across a reddit comment, which of course I can no longer find, moaning about why Great Britain is now The United KIngdom. He or she felt it just didn't have the same meaning. And they are sort of right I think, Great Britain - to me anyway - is somehow more personal, if you take 'great' to mean a size thing rather than a 'rule the world' kind of thing. United seems a bit forced particularly when related to KIngdom. Mind you having a king is perhaps a unifying feature. After all there is no adjective to describe the inhabitants of the United Kingdom, so we still use British which does indeed come from the Britain part of Great Britain. United? I don't think so - except for when it come to sport I guess.
Today, however, I decided to look at this again and found this rather wonderful article - The difference between Britain, Great Britain, The United Kingdom and the British Isles on the Starkey Comics website, which revealed how much more complicated it really is and they didn't even mention the split between the north and the south of England. The subtitle was "and how to talk to them without offending people" which is indeed important, particularly to never call anyone not from England itself, English. The diagram below is a kind of summary, but do read the article for all the complicated ins and outs of it all, which largely depend on whether you are thinking geographically or politically. It's not very long.
I tend to think of myself as English rather than British - well used to. Now I would probably say 'of English origin'. I would not call myself Australian. 'Dépaysé' is a good word that the French have to describe how I feel these days - of no country is, I guess the nearest translation, although that sort of implies the inclusion of all countries, to which I have no connection at all.
Another reason for all this nationalistic kind of stuff is to realise that just about every country thinks they have the best lamb in the world - well not every country of course. Not all countries have lamb. In her book English Food, Jane Grigson went on at length about how British lamb - she might have said English but really she meant British because she mentioned Welsh salt lamb, was so hard to find and that she suspected that even though the French went on about their salt lamb - particularly that from Brittany - around Mont St. Michel, the lamb was probably English:
"Now one may even wonder about the lamb served on Mobt St. Michel. customers sit in high restaurants, looking across the bay at the sheep advancing and retreating, with the tides, over the moss-like verdure. Are there really enough of them to feed all those summer visitors? Surely not?
In his attempt at Plain roast primitive lamb with gravy Neil Buttery, on his website Neil Cooks Grigson acquired Hebridean lamb - shown here - from a farm in Cheshire.
And here's another brief aside - Neil Buttery's copy of English Food is obviously different from mine - and I now discover that she did revise and update it - because I don't have that recipe in my copy.
Getting back to that nationalistic fervour about lamb - Jane Grigson begins her section on lamb in English Food with these words:
"First-class lamb has become a problem in England since the importation of cheap, refrigerated New Zealand lamb ... I sometimes conclude that our best lamb all goes France."
And concludes with these words:
"An elegy for agnus britannicus? Not entirely, for imported lamb does beautifully when treated with a marinade to taste like venison, or when the shoulder is boned and stuffed with rice and apricots ... this type of recipe has inceased in common use in England, to compensate for the coarser flavour of the meat."
Now I wonder how the New Zealanders would feel about that? I guess there is a certain amount of deterioration in the refrigeration, but I'm also guessing that even if the lamb were English it would be refrigerated at some point for transportation from one end of the country to another. And I doubt that the New Zealanders would think that their lamb was not the equal of anything that Europe can produce.
Nor would the Australians come to that. Indeed in one of those little coincidences that happen now and then, although this one is sort of explicable - spring, therefore lamb - the current Coles Magazine has a couple of pieces on spring lamb (no three) - this being the main one, which is a proper cliché about how wonderful Australian lamb is - witness this real Australian farmer, chosen I'm sure for his 'real ozzie' looks, whose face adorns a photograph of some of his 8000 sheep in lush farmland in the NSW Riverina with the following archetypal words about the glory of it all:
"Spring in Australia means warmer weather, greener pastures and irresistible lamb. We spoke to fourth-generation farmer Greg Rae about his love of the land and passion for setting up the next line of farmers in his family to continue what began decades ago."
So true blue. There's even mum's recipe for roast lamb -
"I place the lamb leg on halved onions and garlic cloves, then pour over red wine vinegar or red wine. Then, I sprinkle over chopped garlic, rosemary, salt and a little cracked pepper. The cooking time depnds on the size and how you like it, but I cook it for the minimum of of 6-8 hours. When it starts to fall apart it's done."
Even out in the bush it seems rosemary and garlic rule not to mention red wine or red wine vinegar.
There is no picture of that mum's roast - it's all family and landscape for three pages, but here is Donna Hay's Slow-cooked lamb with garlic and rosemary for slow-cooked is also the modern thing.
And yes all that Coles marketing stuff is corny but I do have to say that Coles lamb is very good - it is tender and tasty without that almost gamey taste that lamb sometimes has.
Lamb, of course, has a few times in the sun - Easter is big for lamb of course - more of a Greek tradition than a British one, but one that has been enthusiastically taken up by all Australians. And in winter it joins all those other roasts and casseroles to cosy us through the cold weather.
Coles is currently all about spring lamb however, and presents this Butterflied lamb with crispy potatoes and charred greens - which is relatively traditional and then Curtis Stone features barbecued lamb - well it's spring, and although he mentions butterflied lamb the focus for him is other cuts that are more suited to the barbecue.
I'll end with another detour courtesy of Jane Grigson, who during her lament about the loss of English lamb, spoke about trips she sometimes made to Cardiff to buy Welsh lamb - also highly prized over there:
"There we buy real Welsh lamb in the covered market, and some laverbread to go with it, before sauntering off our minds at peace to contemplate the Impressionist paintings in the gallery."
The painting is just one from their collection - La Parisienne, locally known as The blue lady, by Jean Renoir
And she concludes, as will I, with:
"We find that our best expeditions satisfy both body and soul - something that English restaurant keepers do not always understand." Jane Grigson
Now maybe that's a whole new topic of conversation.
YEARS GONE BY - I think I'm going to attach the NYT photograph of the day before from now on - just to demonstrate how fusion and/or global food has become so somehow familiar, everyday and almost boring.
October 28
2024 - A day off
2021 - Sauce soubise
2020 - Missing
2017 - Melbourne's laneways
Roast Lamb is one of my favourite dishes and I speak as a citizen of Britain and Australia. What's not to ike, other than slaughtering all those cute lambs! 👍 but 😂