Lamb is a primordial meat of spring, though now available year-round, and good lamb is tied to pasture. Sheep are highly efficient grazers that thrive outdoors. Lambs belong with their mothers, nourished by their milk. After only a couple of days, lambs begin to nibble at grass. If they’re allowed to remain with their mothers, they consume mostly milk, until the balance is tipped at anywhere from six to twelve weeks, shifting wholly to grass at anywhere from eight weeks to eight months. Even in winter, sheep, including lambs, need only hay, with perhaps an option for shelter and a little corn in the coldest weather. Lambs can be fattened entirely on pasture without grain (there’s less work for both people and machines) if they have steady new growth. On an increasing number of small farms, they’re rotated every day or few days through a series of carefully managed paddocks. The best pasture and hay contain as much protein as grain. A farmer once commented to me that in April and May, when the weather is warming and plants are growing fastest, his lambs are “so fat it’s amazing; they’re ready in a month. Those are the best to me.”
Suckling lamb, about four to six weeks old, is very pale, tan, gradually becoming tinged with pink. It’s tender, and some people enjoy it very much, but like kid of the same age, it doesn’t have much character. (To add depth, a shoulder of abbacchio, as suckling lamb is called in Rome, is sometimes cooked with lard, sage, and rosemary and served with anchovy sauce.) For flavor, it’s cooked to at least medium. As lambs get older, their meat becomes more pink and the flavor is more interesting. Eventually it turns red. For simplicity’s sake, lamb is usually defined as being less than a year old. After that, it’s mutton. Typical US-raised lamb is six to eleven months old. But the best lamb taste might lie somewhere between three and six months. And for the best combination of flavor, juice, and tenderness, that meat is cooked rare to medium rare.
Older lamb is often said to taste “muttony”—strong, even pungent, especially the fat, which makes many Americans avoid lamb altogether. Sometimes the grass diet is blamed. Like beef, much lamb is finished on grain, which produces more and harder fat, both outer fat and marbling. The fat comes from the carbohydrates in the grain. The marbled red meat with more saturated fat is often older and has a stronger, meatier taste. Feeding the animals corn increases fat, but other things being equal, it makes a more neutral taste. For the farmer, feeding them grain allows much more control: you know just how much protein the animals are getting.
There are more breeds of sheep than of any other livestock, though cattle come close. For better-tasting lamb, the meat should come from a breed or cross that does well on grass, rather than a special fast-growing cross. Farmers and chefs don’t talk about particular breeds that give better lamb the way they do with pork and beef. But for milder-flavored lamb, it’s essential that the meat come from one of the mutton breeds, as they’re still often called, rather than a wool breed. The sheep valued for wool have much stronger-flavored meat, associated with the wool’s lanolin, the waxy material that helps sheep shed water. US meat breeds are generally British in origin, such as Cheviot, Dorset, Hampshire, and Suffolk. There are also Katahdin and Dorper, called hair sheep, which molt in spring and don’t need shearing. A Pennsylvania farmer I recently spoke with dismissed the idea of top breeds with better taste: “If the lambs gain well on grass and they muscle well, the taste takes care of itself.”
Farmers and chefs agree that lamb, more than beef, tastes of what it eats. In France, there are varied geographic kinds, reflecting the pastures of each place, but the names hardly matter; more important, wherever you are, is to eat what’s local and good. Most distinctive is pré-salé (“salt meadow”) lamb, raised in Britain and especially Brittany and Normandy in France, such as by Mont-Saint-Michel. The sheep advance and retreat with the tides, eating the grasses and other salt-tolerant plants of the coastal marshes. The marine taste is often said to include iodine. A French chef once told me, “You taste the grass, you taste the salt—it’s a completely different taste from other lamb.”
After slaughter, quick chilling tightens and toughens the muscles. To prevent this “cold shortening,” the carcasses should first be held at 55 degrees F (13 degrees C) and then go into the chill for what one hopes is a week of dry-aging and, with more mature lamb with a thicker fat cap, up to two weeks or more. The longer period may not be important, but it adds something. The usual wet-aged meat in plastic has unpleasant, sour-tasting juices around it; dry-aged meat is nutty. For a chef, the problem with buying whole animals from small farms is inconsistent texture, fat, connective tissue, and size, and unequal portions. Animals that run have tougher muscles, which perhaps up to a point is good.
Mutton, the sheep counterpart to beef, was once one of the most admired meats, and the best chefs have never thought otherwise. I hardly know it, but in the US it’s beginning to come back into fashion. (In Britain, a hogget is from one to two years old; only after that is the meat considered mutton, a somewhat more common item in Britain than in North America.) Better mutton is two or more years old and comes not from a ewe but from a wether, a castrated male. If he isn’t castrated, the meat will be too intense. (Lambs that aren’t castrated grow faster; they’re slaughtered too young for it to matter to the taste of the meat.) According to one old haute cuisine account, five-year-old wethers are best, but keeping animals that long is expensive and today unlikely to happen. Mutton is cooked just a little more than lamb, to about 135 degrees F (57 degrees C). In Britain roast mutton is traditionally served with red currant jelly, but black currant is supposed to be better, with its strong, slightly musky side to complement the near gaminess of the meat.
The prestige cut of lamb is the rack, the six to eight ribs next to the shoulder, when they aren’t broken into chops. Next comes the loin; the whole loin is the festive saddle. When the loin is cut into chops, it produces little porterhouses. Then comes the leg. The leg and rack or chops are best cooked rare to medium rare for maximum juice and tenderness. (The papery fell, in young animals, is a light membrane over the fat that covers the whole animal. It’s very minor in young lamb, but in theory, it’s left on the large roasting cuts, to protect them, and removed from small ones, such as chops, because it shrinks in cooking and pulls and distorts them.)
Shoulder chops are uselessly tough, but the shoulder makes excellent ground lamb to go with eggplant in moussaka, in Arab kibbe (usually meatballs), and in sausage. Lamb lends itself to spice. A braised shoulder is one of the best dishes. To be succulent, a braise must be heated slowly and then cooked well below a boil. That’s sometimes done in earthenware pots, which conduct heat poorly and thus more evenly. The shoulder is more likely to hold its juices if it’s braised whole on the bone, but then carving is messy. Somewhat like a roast, a braise benefits from a rest, as the temperature falls and a little of the flavorful juice is reabsorbed into the meat. A navarin printanier, a French spring lamb stew, is named for the navets, the turnips that join the other young vegetables ready in that season, including new potatoes. (A navarin originally called for mutton.) Blanquette de veau, braised shoulder and breast, with its pale egg-thickened sauce, is a classic of French home cooking.
The shanks are the most flavorful part of a lamb, and very succulent if they’re carefully cooked, either braised or otherwise cooked very slowly, so the tough connections turn gelatinous and tender. Shanks especially go with garlic. I once braised a pot of lamb tongues, some of the best tongue I’ve eaten. My favorite kidneys are lamb, and lamb sweetbreads are excellent. I love the Marseille specialty pieds et paquets, “feet and packages”; the feet are cooked for hours with squares of tripe closed around chopped lightly cured pork with garlic and parsley, all in an aromatic tomato-wine sauce.
No meat is better than a roast leg of lamb. A leg logically shouldn’t, but in the US often does, include a section of loin. Cut fully long (uncommon today in the US), it includes the whole shank, and then part of the pleasure is the variety in taste. Most of the meat is rare, but the narrow shank conveniently ends up well-done. For easy carving, you need the long shank to hold on to or, if the leg is young and small enough, to attach a French-style clamp, a manche à gigot, to use as a handle. For years, before putting a leg to roast, I removed the aitch bone (pelvic bone) to make carving easier; then I realized that even if that part of the leg is tightly tied, the cuts lose enough juice during roasting that the easier carving isn’t worth it. The most flavorful, juicy, tender range of doneness is rare to pink—125 to at most 140 degrees F (52 to 60 degrees C). Gigot d’agneau de sept heures, a “seven-hour leg of lamb,” is simmered very slowly with aromatic vegetables, herbs, wine, and stock until it is spoon tender. And a leg is sometimes baked on a bed of beans or potatoes, which benefit from the juice and fat.
Roasting, real roasting, requires intense, dry radiant heat, ideally from an open fire with the meat turning before it. A conventional oven, with its relatively moist heat coming from all sides, bakes whatever is put into it. The metal walls rarely get hotter than 500 degrees F (290 degrees C), while, as Harold McGee explains in his highly useful On Food and Cooking, the glowing coals reach about 2,000 degrees F (1,100 degrees C) and the energy radiating from an object that hot is forty times greater than it is from a 500-degree one. The metal appliance cooks not just by radiation but by convection and conduction (if the meat sits on the bottom of the pan).
To turn the leg of lamb before the fire, one of the oldest and best jacks is a string hanging from a nail and tied to the shank, so the meat slowly twirls. You have to give it a spin from time to time, or the meat will stop and burn on one side. A horizontal spit requires more force to turn it.
Because you roast in front of and not over a fire, the meat has little or no taste of smoke. The intense heat comes from one side only, and because no surface of the meat is exposed to the fire for long, the interior cooks relatively gently and evenly. Remove the meat from the fire or oven when it reaches approximately 120 degrees F (50 degrees C), depending on how rare you like it. Afterward the still-penetrating heat will raise the center a further 10 degrees or so. The leg must rest for twenty to thirty minutes, depending on its size, or the juices will run out when you carve.
The surface should be a rich brown, with crisp fat, and yet the outermost meat, when you slice it, should form only a thin layer of brown; beneath it the succulent interior should be cooked as evenly as possible to no more than medium rare, for maximum juice. It will always be least cooked at the bone. The usual tactic is to first brown the meat with high heat and then cook it more slowly, something that occurs naturally as a fire dies down. For a darker, crisper surface, some of the most careful cooks have always basted with pure fat and no juice, whose water would cool the surface, though other cooks like the mixed fat and juices because they create a flavorful dark gloss.
HOW TO BUY LAMB
According to your taste, look for more tenderness from younger lamb or for stronger flavor from older lamb. And in animals that haven’t been raised on their mothers’ milk, look for grass rather than grain finishing. (Heavily marbled meat from a lot of grain is unnatural for lamb, and the flavor isn’t typical.) Buy lamb, if you can, directly from a farmer whose methods you know, or, probably better, from one of the new wave of butcher shops that specialize in meats from particular farms, which may have more carefully slaughtered and aged meats and have an actual skilled butcher behind the counter.
COMPLEMENTS TO LAMB
It likes garlic, olive oil, onions, tomato, anchovies, olives, capers, rosemary, red and white wine, lemon, curry (and optionally raisins and blanched almonds), saffron, clove, cardamom, and other spice, and lightly crushed juniper berries. Lamb is complemented by beans of all kinds—green, fava, tender newly shelled beans, and dried beans, especially flageolets. It goes with eggplant, bulb fennel, carrots, sweet green peas, spinach, chicory and escarole, braised cabbage, and turnips (such as in a gratin, with a roast). Rhubarb is often mentioned, but I don’t find a special sympathy. Potatoes browned in pan drippings are particularly delicious. Lamb goes with mango chutney. (I’ve mostly avoided condiments in this book, because relying on them can lead to an unthinking sort of cooking, but they’re often excellent. I grew up eating lamb with mint sauce, made quickly and easily by adding chopped fresh spearmint leaves to a sugar-water-vinegar syrup. I have a sentimental attachment to mint sauce with lamb, but I don’t know whether I would like the combination if I came across it now for the first time. It’s a wine killer.)
NOTES ON WINE
A young, flowery white wine goes with lamb braised with vegetables in white wine, and a more substantial white goes with very young, pale roast lamb. Light reds go with braises. But lamb in general complements a more substantial, mature red wine, and first to be mentioned is always Cabernet Sauvignon, particularly Bordeaux. More mature examples of lamb with stronger flavor also go with Burgundy and Rhone wines, traditional Brunello di Montalcino, old Bordeaux, traditional red Rioja, traditional Nebbiolo—wines that go with game.
By Edward Behr in "50 Foods - The Essential of Good Taste", The Penguin Press, New York, 2013, chapter 30. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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