Eating - Jason Epstein [55]
New World goat in the Hispanic style can be agreeable when it is served moist and not overdone or heavily spiced, but the meltingly tender goat that we ate on the Jebel Akhdar that April afternoon, when the apricot and pomegranate blossoms trembled on our mountain meadow against an impossibly blue sky, was nothing like it. I was reminded of another April day, in 1954, in Rome, when in the Piazza Navona Barbara and I first tasted the slow-roasted unweaned lamb that the Romans eat at Easter and call abbacchio, whose traditional method of preparation probably descended from the Arab or perhaps Indian original. In Rome, the lamb is not dry-roasted in a fire pit but slowly braised in an oven.
This preparation, in which the slightly caramelized meat falls away from the bone, like that of a braised shoulder or shank rather than the traditionally pinkish leg of lamb, must have been practiced long before recorded history, when fuel was more valuable than time, and parsimonious cooks conserved the heat of a wood fire by smothering the embers with earth and relying upon the stone lining of the pit to release its heat slowly through the night. Today this technique can be approximated by slow braising in a heavy covered pot, either on the stovetop or in the oven, which is how the Roman cooks must have prepared our memorable abbacchio.
Back in New York at Eastertime after our Omani adventure, I did not dig a hole in the garden, line it with stones, and roast a goat overnight. I did, however, order from my Italian butcher a fifteen-pound lamb. Since these are not likely to be widely available, a twenty-pound spring lamb will do. The preparation is simple, but first the cook must deal with the problem of squeamishness among guests, who may recoil from young lamb as if it were the family poodle. Surely it is not an act of kindness to kill an innocent young lamb, but neither is it kind to kill the pigs that end up in our BLTs. We are omnivores, and in our various cultures—or under extreme conditions in all cultures—we will eat almost anything. In China, where snake soup is a popular restorative, the Chow dog—as in “chow mein” or “chow line”—was bred for the wok, and rats, according to the novelist Patrick O’Brian, were avidly hunted and eaten by Royal Navy midshipmen during the Napoleonic Wars, and surely by their counterparts in other navies throughout history. In my own Chinatown neighborhood, innocent frogs sit in barrels, unaware of the cleaver that awaits them; the French joyously swallow entire buntings in a single bite. Only unwavering vegetarians are entitled to deplore well-prepared infant lamb, but their complaint, though admirable, will not spare the life of a single edible creature.
BRAISED YOUNG LAMB
If you are not handy with a cleaver and saw, ask your butcher to split the lamb in two lengthwise and divide each leg in three pieces and each shoulder in two, leaving a few ribs attached. Then divide the remainder of the rack and the saddle into four pieces. Following a recipe by Marcia Dorr in A Taste of Oman, I made a rub of equal amounts of powdered cinnamon, cumin, cloves, and cardamom sufficient to cover the pieces of lamb, added half as much fresh-ground black pepper as each spice, and let the lamb rest in this rub for two hours or so. The previous night, I had soaked two pounds of pitted dates in water to cover, and in the morning ran the softened dates through a food processor, adding maybe a half-cup of Omani date syrup—an optional ingredient which may not be easily available outside of Oman. In a heavy kettle, I browned the lamb in two cups of peanut oil, poured off and discarded most of the oil, removed the lamb, and threw in the puréed dates and syrup, a cup each of lemon juice and sherry vinegar, and some sea salt, and reduced the liquid by half. Then I checked the salt again, arranged the lamb in two layers, covered the pot, leaving the lid slightly ajar, and braised the lamb over a medium-low flame, turning