Lamb, lamb, lamb

Eastside Road, June 29, 2012—

I'M SURE IT'S BEEN mentioned before: Virgil used to sing,

Of all the meats that we can eat
chicken, beef, or ham,
the one that tickles my palate the most
is lamb, lamb, lamb…
Lamb, lamb, lamb
lamb-y lamb, lamb
(repeat)

And so it goes. I wrote him once that we were having friends over to roast leg of lamb, and he sent the method Marcel Duchamp had always used to do that: very hot oven, short time, brutal almost, and — most important, apparently — keep it warm on a Salton Hottray through the service.

Well, we don't have a Salton Hottray; never have had one. And anyway there's only the two of us here, it's ages since we've cooked a leg of lamb. (Though fifty years ago we did used to roast them from time to time, and you can find my recipe here. It's a little bit over the top, I think, half a century later.)

Well, today, after driving down to the city to see a couple of museum and gallery shows, and lunching on a not terrible croque-monsieur from La Boulange, because we'd walked past it on our way back to the car, and after our Friday Martini on the patio in a splendid evening listening to mockingbirds and finches, we had lamb chops for dinner.

Lindsey slowly cooked some cabbage in butter. Oh boy that smells good, I said; There are some who don't like the smell of cabbage cooking, L. said; They must smell it too often, I said, Or too long cooked.

Anyway the cabbage was delicious, sweet and buttery and cabbagy with that green taste/smell of English peas, or braised lettuce. And the lamb, from our son's animal, a shoulder chop as you see, was delicious.

My father had very few food dislikes, but one of them was lamb. He'd grown up in cattle country, early in the previous century, and the cowman and the shepherd were enemies. Sheep graze grass down shorter than can cattle; where sheep have grazed, cattle find no sustenance. You can imagine the political results among herders.

Oh well. We're past that. After I left home, and tasted lamb for the first time, predictably another weapon in the growing arsenal of rebellion-against-father was an inordinate fondness for lamb. Virgil is right. Lamb, lamb, lamb.

Seguret, Domaine la Garancieère (Côtes de Rhone), 2008 (sound, deep, balanced, rewarding)