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10/30/2001 Archived Entry: "Lamb Stew alla Romana"

This following lamb stew is a perfectly written recipe. You can quibble, perhaps, with the flavoring, although I wouldn’t. I thought the taste was perfect, too. It is strong with garlic, rosemary, and sweet-hot red pepper flakes. What I mean is that the recipe is written precisely, tightly, and leaves no questions about what to do when. It is from the new and second Union Square Café cookbook, Second Helpings, written by the café’s chef-partner Michael Romano and restaurateur-partner Danny Meyer.

It is most unusual for a cookbook of restaurant recipes to be written so well, and to be so well-directed to home cooks. Chefs are not known for their communication skills, to put it mildly. They may be great cooks, but it is not their job to explain to home cooks without the resources and skills of a restaurant kitchen how to prepare the food they make for customers. Indeed, I find most cookbooks written by chefs to be useless to me. The recipes too often involve multiple preparations – meaning I have to make three things or five things to get one plate on the table – and/or they include staples of the restaurant kitchen that most of us do not have in our home kitchens – esoteric stocks, base sauces, and ingredients that are readily available to the trade but not through normal retail sources.

To name a name, there are few dishes in Bobby Flay’s new cookbook, Bobby Flay Cooks American, that I want to cook. When I did select something to try, his pumpkin soup, I was sorely disappointed. In truth, although both Sean, my assistant, and I thought that the soup was too thin, too watery, I was willing to accept its brothiness if that’s the way Bobby serves it. Sean, in a generous moment, said, “Maybe we should consider it refreshing that it’s so thin.” The flavor was good enough. But Bobby says in his book that this soup is his most-requested recipe from his restaurant Mesa Grill in Manhattan.

Texture aside, the recipe itself was not well-conceived. It calls for 1 1/2 cups of canned pumpkin purée, and cans of pumpkin purée hold 1 3/4 cups. What to do with 1/4 cup leftover canned pumpkin purée? Put it in the soup, of course. The flavor and texture needed more pumpkin anyway. Also, the soup is enriched at the end with either crème fraiche, which is slightly soured and thickened cream, a difficult ingredient to find in any but the most sophisticated neighborhoods, or sour cream, which I knew was not going to smooth out even before I added it. And it didn’t. It left little ugly flecks of white fat in the soup.

I brought the soup I made – exactly according to directions – to Bobby to taste when he was on my program. He immediately recognized it as a mistake, not the soup he makes in the restaurant, not the soup that is the most requested recipe. He said it was too thin, and he wondered why I used sour cream instead of crème fraiche. Well, your recipe suggested I use it, Bobby. He was surprised to learn that crème fraiche is hard to find in the supermarket.

Bobby’s book is not the only cookbook with poorly written recipes. (By the way, it was co-written with a supposedly professional kitchen tester and recipe writer.) I baked scones according to the directions in a new baking book, Prairie Home Breads by Judith Fertig, and they were a disaster. They were a disaster I could have predicted, but I stupidly went against my own better judgement and baked them anyway – a recipe for 12 scones made with one pound of butter (you read correctly – one full pound of butter), plus 1 3/4 cup of cream. I mean that’s more fat than in a very rich pastry. The scones oozed and flattened and never became golden as they should, even baking them for nearly twice as long as the recipe said they should be.

Okay, anything with that amount of butter is bound to taste good, but these scones were not an acceptable recipe.

So … it was with so much pleasure and relief that I made the Union Square Café’s lamb stew. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did and my friends did. I prepared it with the Colorado-grown lamb of my new sponsor, Ceder Springs Lamb. They sell the cut called “round,” which is the top of the leg. Second Helpings from the Union Square Café has another recipe that calls for rounds – lamb stuffed with olives – that I am eager to try. But this recipe actually calls for shoulder, which is a less tender cut than round. Using round instead of shoulder meant that I didn’t need to continue cooking the stew for the last half hour to get complete tenderness. I cooked it in the oven for the 1 1/2 hours specified, then added the anchovy paste and simmered it for only another 10 minutes. It stood for a couple of hours before I reheated gently it for serving.

Lamb Stew alla Romana
Makes 4 to 6 servings

3 pounds trimmed lamb shoulder, cut into 1 1/2-inch cubes
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons olive oil
6 cups thinly sliced white onions
2 tablespoons chopped garlic
1 teaspoon Aleppo pepper, or scant 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
3 tablespoons coarsely chopped fresh rosemary
1 1/2 cups white wine
1 cup lamb stock or chicken broth
1 1/2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
2 tablespoons anchovy paste
2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees

Spread the lamb cubes in a single layer on a baking sheet and sprinkle on both sides with 1 1/2 teaspoons salt and 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper.

Heat the oil in a 10-inch straight-sided oven-proof pot or Dutch oven over high heat. Working in batches, brown the meat on all sides and then transfer to a platter. When the lamb has been browned, pour off all but 2 tablespoons of fat from the pot. Add the onions and cook, stirring often, until wilted and lightly browned, about 10 minutes.

Reduce the heat to medium. Stir in the garlic, Aleppo pepper or pepper flakes, and rosemary, and cook 3 to 4 minutes.

Add the lamb to the pot along with the accumulated juices and stir well. Pour the wine, stock, and vinegar over the lamb and bring to a boil. Cover the pot, transfer to the oven, and bake for 1 1/2 hours.

Uncover the pot and stir in the anchovy paste. Return the pot to the oven and continue cooking, uncovered, until the meat is tender enough to cut with a spoon, about 30 minutes longer. The stewing liquid should be reduced enough to lightly coat the meat. If it is too thin, bring the stew to a gentle boil on top of the stove and reduce until the sauce thickened enough to cling to the meat. Taste and adjust for salt and pepper if necessary.

To serve, spoon into a warmed serving bowl and sprinkle with parsley.