Spring Lamb

This is abacchio, which is lamb so young it hasn’t yet grazed. It’s nothing to do with cruelty. Italy makes hundreds of sheep’s milk cheeses and the ewes must lamb to give milk. The little ewes might have a future as milkers, but very few little rams will be needed to grow up and become daddies. Ergo, right about now lambs are being born at a rate of two or even three to a ewe. And in the market arrives spring lamb.
This abacchio is small and lean. It has very little of the scent and flavor of what was good lamb in the United States. At first I wasn’t sold, but now I really love it for its own sake. If I want the much stronger flavor I was used to, I have to wait for grazing lamb to come to market or buy what is called castrato. The day I discovered castrato was a defining day of my early Umbrian experience. I looked at it, and I wondered, “Castrato of what?” So I asked the other women around the meat counter. They stared at me and mumbled something about gender. I responded, “Yes, I know what castration means, but what did they castrate to get this meat?”
The stares became even more combative and the women shrugged and turned their backs on me. A nearby man walked over and said “Pecora!” “Ahhh! Il mio preferito!” said I and bought it. It was exactly what I was used to.
So this tiny leg of lamb is not much bigger than a male turkey leg and thigh. The fat covering is thin. I set out to roast it in a style I think of as Greek, with artichokes, garlic and lemon. As it perfumed the kitchen and was almost done, I wondered what else to have with it and a slightly French idea came to mind: white beans cooked in the pan drippings, which were scant and carmelized on to the glass roasting dish.
This dish would serve six handily. Because I was cooking it just for me, I used just what was already in the house. I actually ended up pricing the meal, because it does seem luxurious to cook even a small leg of lamb for one person, but at the last I froze the leftover pieces of meat as well as the bones and snippets for a later broth, and the servings ended up being less than 2 euro each!

Lamb with Artichokes and White Beans

Preheat the oven to 160C or 325 F

one small leg of lamb (this one was about 1.5 kilo, or 3 pounds)
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and slivered
1 450 g or 1 pound bag of frozen artichoke hearts (if I’d been making this for guests I would have trimmed fresh little artichokes into hearts)
2 lemons
about 2 teaspoons of coarse salt
canned white beans, drained but not rinsed (if you are serving six, then about three 14 ounce cans)

Wash and dry the leg of lamb. Remove the fell if it still has it. Stab the leg here and there with a butcher knife. Into each hole you’ve made, push a little coarse salt and a sliver of garlic. Be careful, if you are using very young lamb it won’t do at all to use a lot of garlic. The flavor is mild and can be easily overwhelmed.

Drizzle some good olive oil into a shallow roasting pan. Toss the artichoke hearts in a layer on it, then sprinkle garlic slivers among them. Scatter some coarse salt over all of it. Then lay the leg of lamb onto the artichoke hearts. Split the lemons and squeeze the juice over the lamb and the artichokes, then tuck the spent rinds among the artichokes.

Cook the lamb to an internal temperature of from 135 F to 145 F (57 C to 62 C) and remove it from the oven to a platter and allow it to rest. Remove the artichokes and garlic and lemon rinds. Discard the rinds and put the artichokes into a covered dish to keep warm.

Empty the beans into the roasting pan, and put the pan back into the oven. Every oncce in a while, use a spatula to scrape up the pan juices. It should only take about 15 minutes for the beans to become warm and browned from the juices.

You can carve the lamb and serve it with the artichokes, the beans and a wedge of lemon.