The Lamb Cookbook

Who doesn't love a good lamb?  We have been thinking of a whole lamb recently.  While the idea has been percolating, the execution has been no where to find.  So we ventured back in time to 1959 to see what Paula Owen might recommend on a much smaller scale.  Owen's The Lamb Cookbook was written at a time when the most extravagant use of lamb was for a shish kebab. 

Owen seems to have a simple premise for this book.  Lamb is a good protein and low in fat.  She does not seem to be from a farming family, nor does she have a sheep farm.  She did, however, publish several books about cooking lamb.

The book has a definite 50's feel to it with cooking techniques outlined in the graphic endpapers.  The men tend to do the braising and broiling while pan frying, simmering, and roasting are women's work.

Her recipes are straight forward, but the cuts need the help of 1950's butcher. Owen lays them out very clearly, but at today's supermarket you will be lucky to find lamb chops and a partial leg of lamb.  Xerox her lamb cuts guide and find yourself a throwback butcher or a modern hipster butcher for lamb ribs or brains.

And speaking of lamb ribs, they are a favorite, but one needs a butcher.  Check out this recipe.

Honey-Garlic Lamb Ribs

2 cloves garlic, mashed
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup dry white wine, sherry or pineapple juice
1/2 cup honey
2 teaspoons curry powder or 1 teaspoon powered ginger
Salt

Combine all ingredients, except salt.  Brush ribs well with mixture and let stand several hours or overnight under refrigeration.  Broil over coals, following equipment manufacturer's directions for spareribs.  Brush frequently with sauce.  Sprinkle lightly with salt.  Serve piping hot.

My guess is you don't have your manufacturer's direction booklet.  While lamb ribs won't take as long as pork ribs, they will take about 2 hours.

The Fallingwater Cookbook

This should come as a huge shock to you, my faithful readers, but for Christmas (and other gift giving opportunities) I often get cookbooks. Truth be told, I don’t really need any sort of special occasion to get cookbooks, but I digress…

This Christmas, my friend Ann, went to my wish list and came up with a couple of real winners. The Fallingwater Cookbook is one of the most interesting books I have come across in recent memory. At Lucindaville, I did a large post on Fallingwater, inspired by this cookbook. I hate to repeat myself, but…

Fallingwater is often considered the greatest house of the twentieth century, but it never appealed to me very much. Wright was never known for his fabulous kitchens, in fact on the majority of his house plans the kitchen is described as simply, “work space.” So I was very interested to read about someone who spent years cooking in one of Wright’s work spaces.

Elsie Henderson began working at Fallingwater in 1947 and stayed until it was given to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963. For several years she worked off and on for the Conservancy and when Edgar Kaufmann jr. died in 1989, she returned to receive 125 guests for his funeral.

While the kitchen stayed basically as Wright had envisioned it, Henderson made one considerable improvement. The original coal-burning Aga stove was replaced with a newer stove to allow for more refined baking.

When Henderson wrote out the recipe for this chili, she used the French word for sugar, sucre. For seven decades she read recipes and translated many from French, so she would often switch between French and English when listing ingredients. At the age of 94, Henderson decided to study the French language more fully and enrolled in classes at the University of Pittsburgh.

Lamb and Rosemary Chili

1 pound ground lamb
1 yellow onion, finely chopped
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh rosemary
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
1 1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1 1/2 cups home-canned or commercial tomato sauce
1 teaspoon sucre (sugar)
1 large can (about 19 ounces) white kidney, or cannelloni, beans

In a large frying pan, cook and stir the ground lamb, onions, and rosemary until the meat is brown and the onion is tender. Season with the salt, white pepper, and chili powder. Add the tomato sauce, sugar, and white beans.

Heat to boiling, reduce the heat and simmer, uncovered, about 1 hour, stirring occasionally, until desired consistency.

If you love food, you’ll love this book. If you love food and architecture, you will absolutely love this book.

Twelve Company Dinners

I pick up cookbooks for different reasons. I tend to always add French and Southern cookbooks (though there is often little difference in them), I like books with a specific focus such as terrines or preserves, and I have all of Elizabeth David and M.F. K. Fisher, but I often buy editions I don’t have as a kind of culinary “overkill”, and I am often overly taken by cookbooks with spectacular photography, but Twelve Company Dinners was a first. I bought it because of the author photo!



Margo Rieman looked like she would make fine dinner company, in fact, twelve dinners. The jacket blurb said Rieman was born on a farm in Utah. She traveled the world on a tramp steamer, wrote for fashion magazines, managed a jazz band and wrote a mystery. She lives(d) in New York City with her husband and two dachshunds. She is shown with the dachshunds that are described as “remarkable” but her husband is nowhere in site. He seems to have not been remarkable! She is also photographed with a drink and a cigarette but no food.

The premise for this book is to provide twelve dinner party menus with as much of the guesswork removed as possible. Rieman provide foe each dinner, a menu, a shopping list, a detailed and timed progression of activities and the recipes.



Since it is the late Fifties, many of the ingredients come from cans, which might be one of the reasons Rieman is photographed sans food but fortified with drinks.

She recommends for gourmets a dinner of Lamb Shashlik.

The menu includes:

Brandied Pâté (made from canned pâté and canned mushrooms)
Hot Cheese Balls (made with jarred cheese and canned deviled ham)
Lamb Shashlik
Kasha
Hot Yeast Rolls (made from a boxed mix)
Green Salad (made from actual lettuce)
Chocolate Rum Roll (a recipe from Dione Lucas)

Shashlik

4 lbs. leg of lamb, cut in 2” X 2” squares
1/4 cup sherry
2 onions
2 tbs. oregano
1 large eggplant
6 tomatoes
charcoal powder
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 tsp. salt
1 clove garlic
24 tiny onions or 6 medium
6 green peppers

Make a marinade for the lamb by chopping fine 2 medium onions. In a bowl, crush onions with salt to extract a little juice. Then add garlic, olive oil, sherry and oregano. Stir well, then marinate lamb overnight in this mixture. Thread long skewers with lamb, eggplant squares, green pepper squares, tomato quarters and onions, either small onions or medium ones cut in quarters. Try to put four of each on the skewers. Sprinkle with charcoal powder and broil eight minutes on each side, sixteen minutes in all.

The instructions are very detailed, but here is the gist:

Day before
BEGIN SASHLIK

Morning or day before
MAKE PATÉ

Morning
MAKE CHEESE BALLS
MAKE CHOCOLATE RUM ROLL

Afternoon
PREPARE SALAD

5:30 PM
CONTINUE SASHLIK

6:00 PM
BEGIN HOT ROLLS

6:05 PM
PREPARE KASHA

6:30 PM
Get dressed for dinner

6:55 PM
Back to the kitchen as guests arrive at 7.
CONTINUE ROLLS

7:10 PM
If some of your guests have arrived
REMOVE PATÉ FROM REFRIGERATOR

7:15 PM
CONTINUE CHEESE BALLS

7:40 PM
CONTINUE SHASHLIK

7:45 PM
CONTINUE SALAD

7:48 PM
TURN SHASHLIK

8:00 PM
FINISH SHASHLIK

8:02 PM
CONTINUE ROLLS

8:15 PM
RETURN TO KITCHEN FOR ROLLS
START COFFEE

9:00 PM
Guests finish eating.
TAKE COFFEE AND CHOCOLATE ROLL TO TABLE

Wow, I’m not sure, but if I had to keep all those times together, I might just lose track of dinner all together.


And she seems so laid back in the picture!

My Dinner Party Book

"One of the things Duchesses frequently do is entertain. Some find it a terrible trial, and, to be honest, aren't very good at it. I am fortunate in that I love entertaining and without sounding conceited some say that I am quite good at it!"

Margaret, Duchess of Argyll

Cecil Beaton's drawing of Margaret

For over thirty years the Duchess of Argyll entertained many of the rich and famous, the poor and famous and the rich- and-not-that famous. Like many of those with landed English homes, the Duchess' Georgian house in Mayfair with its pine panelled dining room and long Italian walnut table were sold. The Duchess kept detailed diaries of her many dinner parties, each bound in red leather and kept close at hand to remember the events and to know what worked well and what didn't.

More than recipes, the idea of keeping a detailed "entertaining" diary is a grand one. If you have even one party a year, it is well worth the trouble to compile your notes, guests, foods, wines even a snapshot of the table settings for further review. Start NOW! Don't worry yourself with the ones that got away.

Some of the best of her parties were collected in, My Dinner Party Book, a combination cookbook, entertaining treatise, etiquette manual with a bit of gossip thrown in.

In honor of all those "royals" she entertained, here is her recipe for...

Crown of Lamb

Ask your butcher to prepare a crown of lamb from two pieces of best end of neck, each with about six cutlets. He will need to be given a little notice for this. Make sure the crown is secure with string and skewers. Place in a roasting tin. fill the center with foil so the crown keeps its shape during cooking and twist some foil around the exposed bones to prevent burning. Spread the meat with a little dripping, sprinkle with salt and pepper and roast for 30 minutes per lb plus 30 minutes at 350F (180C, gas mark 4). After cooking, remove all the foil and hang little cutlet frills on the end of the bones. The centre of the crown can be stuffed with sausagemeat, sage and onion stuffing or any other good stuffing before cooking. Alternatively, it can be filled with small vegetables just before cooking.

Wether you are throwing a cocktail party or full blown dinner dance, Margaret, Duchess of Argyll can give you a hand in your preparations. And she makes stylish socks, too.

At the opening of David Hick's shop in New York.
Lord Louis Mountbatten, Margaret, Hicks, Pamela Hicks

The Supper Of The Lamb

The Supper of the Lamb is one of the finest examples of writing in the English language. It is a cookbook. It is a religious meditation; a meditation on life and living and food and spirit. This book is famous for its recipe for “Leg of Lamb for Eight People Four Times.”

The second chapter of The Supper Of The Lamb, entitled “The First Session,” is a ten page discussion of an onion. Think of every recipe you have ever made that included onions. I promise you that after reading Capon, you will never view an onion the same way again. You will never look at food writing the same way again, either.

As a priest, Capon practices a “waste not, want not” philosophy. This recipe takes something that generally ends up in the compost, the butt end of celery or the knob.

Celery Knobs

Peel and slice some celery knobs. Cook them, covered, in a very little water (there should be next to no liquid left). Drain, season, and brown in butter.

Here is Robert Farrar Capon's prayer for those who eat, fast, diet and hold food reverentially.

O, Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with, and casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity. Take away our fear of fat, and make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron’s beard. Give us pasta with a hundred fillings, and rice in a thousand variations. Above all, give us the grace to live as true men – to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gracefully on all that comes to hand. Drive far from us, O Most Bountiful, all creatures of air and darkness; cast out the demons that posses us; deliver us from the fear of calories and the bondage of nutrition; and set us free once more in our own land, where we shall serve thee as thou hast blessed us –with the dew of heaven, the fatness or the earth, and the plenty of corn and wine. Amen.

Happy Easter.