Lamb for springtime feasting

If you didn’t grow up on chops or a leg roasted and served with mint sauce, you may not be open to the many flavors and possibilities of lamb.

I discovered it as a teenager, wandering the closed-to-traffic cobbled streets around Rue de la Harpe and Metro St. Michel in Paris. Roasted on a spit just inside a Middle Eastern restaurant’s picture window and take-out booth, lamb was sliced right off the turning-roasting contraption, folded into warm pita bread and served with cucumber yogurt sauce. I’m not sure as a hungry adolescent I even knew what I was eating, but I loved it. Last time I checked, you can still get it this way, munching the sandwich while you walk past the street artists and fire eaters on your way to the banks of the Seine.

Lamb is a local meat that may be coming into its own as a flavoring protein for otherwise plant-based recipes. Availability of local lamb is growing (see box), and because it has not traveled far to our kitchens, I find the neighborhood product sweet and not gamey, as commercial varieties can be.

The following recipe is festive and robust but affordable. Many culinary traditions feature spring as the time for roast leg of lamb or chops, and this came to be, in part, because it’s the time of year these animals were harvested. Now the meat is available year-round, thanks to deep freezing. But those cuts can be expensive and held in esteem for special occasions. Cheaper cuts need no such excuse. A windy April evening, the chill of winter not quite gone, is as companionable a setting for this dish as a languid, sunny weekend lunch on the back deck.

I searched through cookbooks to account for what recipe most influenced the one that lives in my head, and was surprised that it was not a Marcella Hazan tome, but Simply in Season, a must-have tool for locavores. My recipe differs from theirs in the amounts of herbs, meat and broth, plus the addition of balsamic vinegar at the end. Variations of the basic mixture can be found all over Europe and in the Marches, Apulia and Sardinia regions of Italy. Some cooks stew the lamb with potatoes instead of white beans.