Ingredients
1 small lamb about 17 - 18 lbs killed and prepared a day in advance
Melt butter designated for the stuffing in a skillet and fry onions, chopped meat and nuts. When it is fried remove to a pot and add salt, pepper, saffron, rice and water. Boil about 5 minutes over high heat, then reduce heat to moderate and cook until done.
Salt the lamb inside out and rub in with pepper. Stuff with the above stuffing and sew and truss or have it kneeling on its foreleg in a baking pan. Pour melted butter over it and put in moderately hot oven and bake until done. Baste it often with melted butter and some of its own juice. Cover all the top part of it with foil. Turn lamb from time to time.
When lamb is done remove baking pan and keep hot in another container. Drain out all but a very little of the butter and sauce in the pan in which the lamb was baked. Place pan on top of stove and add flour and stir until it turns brown. Pour over it the liquid that was drained out and saved and let it boil till it begins to thicken. Pour it into a strainer. Return the stained sauce to boil a little longer over low heat and keep hot until ready to serve. If much butter appears on top of sauce, skim it off the top. Service lamb on large tray or platter and sauce in a separate container.
I love Piccalilli and was very disappointed when Garners stopped producing theirs because I thought it was the best. I am convinced that people who say they hate piccalilli can only have tried one of the inferior insipid and acidic versions that masquerade as this fine pickle.
So I decided to make my own and started my quest for the perfect recipe, I have scoured my cookery books and trawled the internet and then I remembered Mrs Beeton's book of Household Management and there I found a recipe for Indian Pickle, maybe this is where Piccalilli originates from? I don't think I'll be following it, no doubt mine will be an amalgam of many but this one is a curiosity.
Indian Pickle (very superior)
The ingredients are:
To each gallon of vinegar allow 6 cloves of garlic, 12 shalots, 2 sticks of sliced horseradish, 1/4 lb of bruised ginger, 2 oz of whole black pepper, 1 oz of long pepper, 1 oz of allspice, 12 cloves, 1/4 oz of cayenne, 2 oz of mustard seed, 1/4 lb of mustard, 1 oz of turmeric, a white cabbage, cauliflowers, radish-pods, French beans, gherkins, small round pickling onions, nasturtiums, capsicums, chilies, &c.
Another curiosity I found whilst browsing Mrs B is a rhyming recipe for a salad, I love the way sauce has been rhymed with toss!
"Two large potatoes, pass'd through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give,
Of mordent mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites too soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt;
Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar procured from 'town';
True flavour needs it, and your poet begs,
The pounded yellow of two well boiled eggs,
Let onion's atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole;
And, lastly, in the flavour'd compound toss
A magic spoonful of anchovy sauce.
Oh! great and glorious, and herbaceous treat,
'Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat,
Back to the world he'd turn his weary soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl."
