Learning the Best Cuts of Meat by the Book

The coming holiday of Easter is a time when a cook needs a good butcher’s advice. In these days of packaged meat and automated sales help, it is harder to find a butcher willing to dispense wisdom about cuts of meat in a supermarket.

My advice is to buy a good book on the subject. And learn, once and for all, whether the cut of lamb in the display case is a saddle, chuck or bracelet. More important, what is the difference in price and cooking time?

Luckier than most shoppers, I have lived in New York’s Greenwich Village for years. It has always been an environ populated with small family meat markets. And although there are fewer to be found today than in the old days, one of the best remains flourishing and intact on Jones Street: Florence Meat Market. It is a landmark worthy of any tourist’s stopover just to experience the old-fashioned care our grandmothers took for granted as shopper’s prerogatives.

A Butcher’s Guide

If you cannot visit the market, my second best advice is purchase a copy of “Jack Ubaldi’s Meat Book: A Butcher’s Guide To Buying, Cutting and Cooking Meat,” by Jack Ubaldi and Elizabeth Crossman (Macmillan: $24.95, 1987).

Ubaldi founded and ran Florence Meat Market for 40 years and is now retired. Currently he is on the faculty at the New York Restaurant School. Ubaldi’s book is an amalgam of expertise mixed with a good sense of consumer’s concerns and a cook’s instinct for what will inform, delight and expand a cook’s repertory.

Ubaldi’s book has more than 200 recipes for preparing poultry, pork, lamb, veal, beef, variety meats, sausages and game. I use his tome as a shopping guide for my own favorite recipes as well. Here are two notable examples.

This curious formula is one of the first wonderful lamb dishes I learned to master in the kitchen as a late adolescent. The recipe is Swedish in origin and was always reputed to be the handiwork of the late actor and cook Alfred Lunt.

ROAST LAMB WITH COFFEE AND CREAM

1 (7-pound) leg of lamb

1 clove garlic, silvered

Salt, freshly ground pepper

1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 cup hot strong coffee

1/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons whipping cream

1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon Cognac

2 teaspoons sugar

1/4 cup hot water

1 teaspoon cornstarch

Mint jelly

Remove fell and most of fat from lamb. Insert slivers of garlic into fell side. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Spread with butter. Place on rack in roasting pan. Roast at 375 degrees until juices begin to run, about 30 minutes.

Mix coffee, 1/4 cup cream, 1/4 cup Cognac and sugar in small bowl. Pour over lamb. Reduce heat to 350 degrees. Continue roasting, basting every 10 minutes, until meat thermometer registers 140 degrees for rare, about 1 hour.

Remove lamb from oven. Place on serving platter. Skim fat from pan juices. Transfer pan juices to small saucepan. Combine water, remaining 3 tablespoons cream, remaining 1 tablespoon Cognac and cornstarch in small bowl. Whisk into pan juices. Cook, over medium-high heat, whisking just until slightly thickened, 3 to 5 minutes. Strain. Serve lamb with sauce and mint jelly. Makes 6 to 8 servings.

Not too many great dishes have come from Wyoming. However, I do have an old 1879 prescription for a roast lamb that is marinated in buttermilk before cooking, which could change the gastronomic perception about that territory. It is obviously Cheyenne’s major contribution to American cuisine.

CHEYENNE BUTTERMILK-ROASTED LAMB

1 (6-pound) leg of lamb

1 clove garlic, cut into slivers

2 cloves garlic, mashed

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

1/2 teaspoon soy sauce

Freshly ground pepper

3 tablespoons olive oil

1/4 cup buttermilk

1/2 cup dry white wine

1 1/2 cups beef broth

2 sprigs rosemary

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

Salt

Pierce holes in top of lamb at 1 1/2-inch intervals with ice pick. Insert sliver of garlic into each hole.

Combine mashed garlic, mustard, soy sauce and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper. Slowly beat in oil, a few drops at a time. Slowly add buttermilk. Pour mixture over lamb. Let stand at least 6 hours, basting lamb frequently with mixture that runs off.

Place lamb on rack in roasting pan. Reserve excess buttermilk coating. Roast lamb at 400 degrees about 15 minutes.

Combine excess buttermilk mixture, wine and 1/2 cup beef broth. Pour around lamb into roasting pan. Add rosemary. Reduce oven to 300 degrees. Continue to roast lamb 15 minutes for each pound for medium-rare. Add remaining beef broth as juices in pan begin to dry up.

Remove excess fat from sauce. Add butter. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve sauce with lamb. Makes 6 to 8 servings.