Kiwi leg of lamb with Middle East-style stuffing

Press, 27 July 1989, Page 9

Kiwi leg of lamb with Middle East-style stuffing

Food & Fable

by

David Burton

At the altar of homegrown Kiwi cuisine, colonial goose occupies a place almost as elevated as the holiest of holies, pavlova. Both are true national dishes in that every New Zealander has eaten them or at least knows what they are. Despite its unfashionably high sugar content, pavlova is still sufficiently popular to keep a nationwide manufacturer in business, while our butchers continue to offer colonial goose made up ready for the oven. Furthermore, unlike say toheroa soup or whitebait fritters, they are not . dishes made distinctive only by their use of unique local ingredients, but the very embodiments of Kiwi ingenuity, inspirations which some unknown colonial cook simply snatched out of the ether. Or so we like to think. The fact is, however, that both pavlova and colonial goose are more constructions upon an inherited tradition than anything startlingly original in themselves. No cuisine exists in a vacuum, and New Zealand’s has borrowed more from others than most. Leaving aside the arguments as to whether pavlova first emerged as a named dish in Australia or New Zealand, the dish has quite a clear ancestor in the patissierie tradition of Vienna, specifically the Spanische Windtorte, or Spanish Wind cake. This consists of a meringue disc upon which a series of cooked rings of meringue is stacked, forming a hollow cylinder, which is then filled with whipped cream and berries and topped with another disc of meringue. The name by the way, does not allude to postmasticatory emissions but

rather is a tribute to its lightness. There is none of the kiwifruit and passionfruit,or the cornflour which cements our pavlova into a solid cake, but the basic idea is there all the same. As for colonial goose, it has to be said that filling a joint of meat with stuffing is hardly the most

original idea in the world. The Romans were busy at it 2000 years ago and took the idea to Britain, where it was enormously popular in the Middle Ages. Roast lamb with stuffings of breadcrumbs, suet, and oysters, or crab and egg, are classic English recipes, while a direct antecedent to colonial goose -can be seen in a 1712 Scottish recipe in a manuscript book by Lady Castlehill: “To boile or rost a legg of Mutton. Take all sorts of sweet herbs, and the yolks of hard eggs shred small togither: Then take marrow (if you have none beef suet will serve) let it be in pretty bige pices, then roll it in your shred herbs and eggs, and stuff your mutton with it. Rost or boile it.” Furthermore, in “The Compleat Housewife or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion,” of 1753, we read how a leg of veal mutton or lamb may be forced with a

mixture of pounded meat and suet, grated bread, cloves, mace and “sweet herbs shred small.” So it would appear the only truly unique aspect of colonial goose is its peculiar name. The standard Kiwi explanation of its origin is that the boned and stuffed leg resembles ' a goose.

This has never quite satisfied me, for no way does a leg of lamb look like a goose, no matter how religiously you follow early recipes, which tell you to stuff and sew up the leg and then “push with the hands into the shape of a goose,” or to bind the leg tightly near the end to form a gooses “head.” The whole point of the name, I believe, is that the colonials were using a stuffing which in England had formerly gone into a goose. The cosmetic effects were merely intended to round out the fiction that the mutton was goose. While the list of stuffing ingredients for colonial goose can vary quite widely, the most common

is sage, breadcrumbs, suet and onion, which along with minced apple, is the traditional English recipe for goose stuffing. Supporting my theory is an, English recipe for Mock Goose given by Dr Kitchiner in his “Cook’s Oracle,” of 1817. This is a leg of pork with the afore mentioned goose stuffing. A similar recipe, "to goosify a shoulder of lamb,” is given by Priscilla Haslehurst in her “Housekeeper’s Instructor,” of 1816. From goosified lamb and mock goose, it was but a short step to colonial goose. Since many settlers were forced to chew their way through mutton three times a day, it is not at all surprsing that they regularly felt the need to dress it as something else. Today we don’t feel the need quite so much and the stuffing too has changed. . Here is a popular modern stuffing incorporating dried apricots, a fruit which so successfully sets off the flavour of lamb in the cooking of the Middle East: Roughly chop 120 g dried apricots and mix with 120 g fresh breadcrumbs. Melt 25g butter and Itbsp honey together in a saucepan and add to the mixture along with half a small onion, grated, and thyme. Season to taste with salt and pepper and mix in 1 beaten egg. Remove the bone from a leg of lamb by working gradually from each end with a thin-bladed knife, taking care not to break the skin. At first you may feel like a .surgeon at an army field hospital, but eventually you will get the hang of it Stuff the cavity with the apricot mixture and sew up with a string. Roast the leg at 180 C, allowing about minutes for each 500 grams. *