New rite of spring
THIS weekend being Easter, many Americans will sit down to a Sunday dinner of roast lamb. And that will be the last time they try the meat until the same time next year.
Lamb is to this holiday what turkey once was to Thanksgiving, something served once a year and, for many, eaten more for ceremony than for pleasure.
This isn't idle speculation; I've got statistics to back me up. Americans' annual per capita consumption of lamb stands at four-fifths of a pound. Because a 5-pound leg will serve about eight people, that works out to about a dinner a year, give or take a sandwich the next day.
But if it is prepared the right way, what a dinner that will be. There is no roast better than a leg of lamb -- golden brown skin, moist pink flesh. The flavor is a compelling blend of something like beef but with a distinctive, gamy note thrown in. The aroma is entrancing.
What's more, lamb marries so well with so many other flavors: Garlic seems to become sweeter when cooked with it and black olives meatier. Lamb wears capers like diamonds and the perfume of fresh herbs like some beautiful women wear Chanel No. 5.
This is the thing that has always puzzled me: Why is it that one of the most flavorful meats you can buy is so often ignored? If we have embraced turkey as a year-round ingredient, can't we do the same for lamb?
The reason more Americans don't love lamb, I have come to believe, is that most of the time that Easter leg is roasted wrong. That's not just the fault of the cooks involved, but also of many of the recipes they follow.
The problem is pretty simple: Most recipes call for leg of lamb to be served underdone. Thumb through your library -- you'll find cookbooks calling for a leg of lamb to be served at 120, 115 and even 110 degrees.
This, in my opinion, is horrible advice. Leg of lamb at these temperatures is stringy in texture, even gristly. To be at its best, lamb needs to be cooked to the high end of the medium-rare scale, even to low medium. That means temperatures from 130 to 135 degrees.
That may sound heretical -- somehow we've come to associate bloody meat with true gourmandism -- but give it a try.
The language of done-ness is notoriously vague -- one person's medium rare is another's nearly raw. So let's be explicit: When leg of lamb is cooked to around 130 degrees, the meat is still pink and moist but the stringy tendons have begun to melt and the spongy flesh has begun to firm.
