Honeyed shoulder of lamb with flageolet beans

What to have for Sunday dinner at Easter? There are several options; if you look up suggestions for an Easter Sunday roast online you’ll find options involving pork, beef and chicken. However, the meat that is most traditionally associated with Easter is lamb. It’s closely associated with spring, and the religious symbolism – the Last Supper having been a Passover meal, and lamb being the meat most associated with the Passover – is a strong one.

It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that while British lamb isn’t as intensively farmed as (say) beef and pork, lamb for the “ever-reliable” Easter market comes from flocks specially managed for autumn lambing, according to The River Cottage Meat Book (most flocks would be lambing in the spring if left to their own devices). Specifically, we opted for shoulder – which, according to Hugh F-W in the above book, is “wrongly thought of as the poor man’s leg … plenty of tender meat, albeit in a form that is not easy to carve.”

We already had a recipe for lamb shoulder that we’ve used before, and liked – and it’s a bit different, as the main accompaniment is flageolet beans (“a high-class variation of the haricot, and quite delicious”, according to Delia Smith) rather than roast potatoes. We’re not entirely sure how we came to have this recipe (it was clipped from a magazine called Good Taste which apparently promotes food from Lincolnshire, not a county that Allison and I have visited – so goodness knows how we got hold of it). It’s also not the best-written of recipes, as it calls for lemon juice and zest in the ingredients but doesn’t mention what to do with the zest in the instructions, while oil (type and quantity unknown) is omitted from the ingredients but mentioned in the instructions. We also didn’t have all of the required herbs in ‘fresh’ form so we did what we could, and what’s presented here is a somewhat modified recipe.

Mix the juice and zest of a lemon with two tablespoons of honey, two tablespoons of olive oil and a couple of generous pinches of dried oregano. Cut a head of garlic in half (horizontally) and place both halves in a lined roasting tin; place a 1.4kg (3lb) shoulder of lamb on top of this and rub it with the mixture. Sprinkle salt and pepper over the lamb, and place sprigs of rosemary and thyme – four or five of each – atop and beside it. Add 150ml of stock (chicken or vegetable will do) to the tin, and stick in an oven pre-heated to 180°C (or 400°F, or gas mark 6).

Cook for 2½ hours, and allow to rest for 30 minutes after that. In the meantime, melt 30g butter in a sauté pan, then add one chopped onion and two or three finely-chopped cloves of garlic. When these have been sweated for 5-10 minutes, add the (drained) contents of two tins of flageolet beans and approximately one teaspoon of finely chopped rosemary leaves. After coating the beans, add 100ml of stock and bring to the boil, then simmer for three minutes. Add three tablespoons of double cream and bring to the boil again; season with salt and pepper.

Once the lamb has been transferred from the roasting tin to the carving-plate, strain the liquid, syphon off the fat and thicken the liquid if required to serve as an accompanying jus.

We served ours with pan-fried kale. Delicious – another winner!

As it happens, we actually used a somewhat larger shoulder than specified in the recipe, so we modified the cooking time accordingly. This left us with a fair amount of leftover lamb meat, as well as the bones. What to do with those? Stay tuned…

Hot cross buns

Easter is a time for baking (there’s something allegorical about the dough rising), and this year I thought: Why not give hot cross buns a try?

Although they are very much an Easter food, hot cross buns can be purchased throughout the year these days – although a local pub only does its “hot cross burger” at this time of year (yes, that is what you think it is and no, I haven’t tried it).

Hot cross buns are an old English delicacy traditionally associated with Good Friday, and there’s a religious symbolism in the ingredients – the dough refers to bread served at communion, the spices allude to the spices that were wrapped with Jesus’s body and the cross is, well, self-evident. Their provenance, though, is a bit hazy – some say they go back to Roman times (the Romans are known to have made buns with crosses on them, but this may have been so they could easily be broken into four parts), while others reckon they’re a Saxon thing (associating them with the worship of the pagan goddess Eostre). There are various superstitions and traditions about hot cross buns being used medicinally and being hung in the kitchen to protect against fire (in this tradition, the hanging bun – said not to go mouldy if baked on Good Friday – is replaced annually). However, there are no written records about them until Elizabethan times, when their consumption was restricted to festive periods, and the earliest recipes for them date from the eighteenth century.

After trawling through our recipe-books, I decided to go for the hot cross bun recipe in my copy of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course (“a new edition for the 1990s”). Like many a festive recipe, hot cross buns have a much wider ingredients list than more everyday bread-based products, and as is the case with the traditional Ukrainian paska that I made last year, a case could be made for associating the extra ingredients – the butter, the eggs – with the end of Lent. The hot cross bun recipe called for a trip to the shops for a couple of items (while I still had some currants left over from the raisin loaf, the likes of ground mixed spice and cut mixed peel were not things that I already had).

So where to begin? Yeast first – Delia said to use the dried stuff, mixed with caster sugar and “hand-hot” water and left “until a good frothy ‘beer’ head forms”. Meanwhile, the dried goods – plain flour, salt, mixed spice, sugar, currants and mixed peel, were mixed together in a bowl, to which was added all of the wet goods – the yeast mix, milk (“again hand-hot”), melted butter and a beaten egg. I must admit to being a bit worried that that last one would scramble, what with the butter having just come off the stove, but in the event it didn’t. This was kneaded together and, though sticky at first, it did end up being “smooth and elastic”, just as Delia had promised it would be (although I bake a fair bit, I must confess to being a bit sceptical at times about sticky dough acquiring a smoothness without the addition of more flour, especially when using a recipe I haven’t tried before; that said, the kneading is always my favourite part).

One rising and knocking-down later, I divided the mix into twelve portions (is this supposed to be symbolic of the Disciples?) and arranged them on a baking tray. I then made a deep cross on each of them with a knife – this is how the crosses on hot cross buns were originally done – before considering the note that the bottom that mentioned that, for “more distinct crosses, use a flour-and-water paste”. Unfortunately I had by now ran out of plain flour, so I used wholemeal instead (it was that or self-raising). The paste was rolled out into thin strips which were placed atop the buns which I then left to rise.

After just fifteen minutes in the oven, the buns were ready! One last thing to do, though – brush them with a sugar-and-water solution as soon as they emerged, in order to make them sticky.

Sticky they most certainly are. While I am not entirely happy with the crosses (should’ve gone to get some more plain flour, plus they’re a bit on the thick side), I’m pleased with the way the buns have turned out. I won’t be serving them with burgers, though.

Baking for Easter

To celebrate Easter, I have been utilising my baking skills. In honour of Allison’s Ukrainian-Canadian heritage, I have baked paska, the special bread which Ukrainians bake for this event.

Paska (the word derives from the Hebrew word pesakh, meaning ‘passover’) is one of those breads that moves away from the basic four ingredients of bread (flour, water, yeast, salt) by including milk, eggs, sugar and butter. Such breads are common among many communities for a celebratory event; in this case, the celebration of Easter. Many cultures have special bread that is only made on special occasions, and for Ukrainian Catholics the celebration of Easter is a very special occasion. Hence the inclusion of eggs in the recipe – although they are beaten before being mixed into the dough, I have found out that the yellow from the yolk is symbolic of Jesus rising from the dead while the white symbolises the Holy Ghost.

I used the recipe from a book called Traditional Ukrainian Cookery by Savella Stechishin –one of the first Ukrainian-Canadian cookbooks which was first published in the Fifties and which had got through seventeen editions before Allison was given a signed copy in recognition of a school project in 1991. All of the recipes in this book have their names given in the Cyrillic as well as the Latin alphabet, and some are credited to women from places in Saskatchewan and Alberta; I imagine all of these ladies to be five-foot-two grannies who worked hard to put food on the table for their families out on the prairies.

It starts with sugar – used in many bread recipes as an accelerant for the yeast – being dissolved in warm water before dried yeast is sprinkled over it. To this is added lukewarm milk that has previously been scalded (almost but not quite brought to the boil) and flour, which is covered and left until bubbly. Beaten eggs, sugar, melted butter and salt are added to this, the resulting dough being kneaded – always my favourite part – until it’s “smooth and satiny” according to Mrs Stechishin’s instructions.

This is left until doubled in bulk, then knocked down prior to the decoration. For this, two-thirds of the dough is used for the loaf, with the other third being used for the decoration. This has to go on the dough before the final rising, so I wasn’t inclined to do anything too elaborate as it might weigh the dough down and thus prevent it from rising (although I’ve seen some photograph of paska that are very elaborately decorated!), besides which Mrs Stechishin states that “elaborate ornaments require experience”. I have experience of doing braids for the Christmas kalach, and of decorating the top of a meat pie with a Union Jack made from the leftover bits of pastry, so I rolled my decorative third out into strands and did a braided cross design.

This was set aside to rise again and, to my surprise, it rose very quickly; how seasonally appropriate! After being brushed with beaten egg, it went into the oven for 55 minutes.

The result was, I am happy to report, one of my better bread-making efforts – the braided-cross effect looked particularly good. Bread made to celebrate special events is always bread above the norm, and after letting it cool overnight we toasted it for breakfast this morning. And then we had some for lunch. And there’s some more for tomorrow too. Even though I halved the recipe, we’re not going to go short of paska any time soon!