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Food and Drink

The politics and persuasions of lamb
glendabyline

I’m the kind of person who likes to have reindeer for Christmas dinner and lamb or rabbit, or at least a roast chicken, for Easter.

Some people, like my sister, who takes great exception to such practices, might find this a bit upsetting. But for me it’s a way of honouring these creatures that, for the most part, have been much reduced to fluffy little Hallmark/Disney things, gamboling through airbrushed meadows with daisy garlands about their necks, empty replicas of their former noble, unmediated selves.

We cook them very considerately, these animals that have been with us on feast days for centuries, often turning to recipes from the Old World. These usually take not a lot of time to prepare, but often a long time to cook, so the aromas fill our comfortable home with more comfort before guests arrive. Most seem quite pleased by the results.

We won’t be serving lamb this Easter, mainly because we’ll be having dinner elsewhere. But I just want to put it out there that roast lamb, as opposed to the traditional ham or turkey, makes for a wonderful Easter dinner. If you have kids, just tell them it’s roast beef and they’ll be fine.

Easter or not, lamb can be a real deal-breaker. I may have started serving it myself in part to distinguish myself from “mom”, as all young people must do. My mother could not stand even the smell of roast lamb — never mind mutton — so it was never served when I was a kid.

Later, when I was a reasonable facsimile of an adult with my own place, I had a dog that couldn’t take it, either. She went berserk whenever we cooked lamb, circling up to the oven door, yowling and whining, then running around the kitchen in an agitated frenzy, looping out to the living room, and back to the oven door to drive herself nuts all over again.

We wondered if it smelled like roast dog, or something close to herself — not that we would know.

I found this all very curious until I read a passage last week in Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking . In fact, lamb has special properties that account for its unique aroma, ergo taste — one you’re either “for or agin”.

Apparently, the distinction in various meat flavours doesn’t depend much on the muscle tissue itself, since that tastes pretty much the same in all animals. The only variation is that well-exercised muscle with its higher portion of red fibres (a chicken leg or beef, for instance) has more flavour than less-exercised, predominantly white fibre muscle tissue (chicken breast or veal). The reason: red fibres contain more materials that can potentially generate flavour and more substances that break down these flavours. And so it is that the connection between exercise and flavour, at least for non-human animals, has been known by good cooks for ages.

When it comes to the distinctive flavours we attribute to different types of meat — and there’s no denying lamb is distinctive — it’s the fat cells, which store anything fat-soluble, that make the difference.

According to McGee, the fat molecules themselves can be transformed by heat and oxygen into molecules that smell fruity, floral, nutty, green or whatever, depending on the nature of the fat.

Compounds from forage plants like alfalfa produce the “cowy” flavour of beef. The sweetness of pork comes from a kind of molecule, called lactones, that also gives coconut and peaches their characteristic flavours. I picture a panel of gastronomes coming soon to a meat department near you for a signature meat-tasting, complete with hallowed pronouncements comparable to any wine-tasting.

In the case of lambs and sheep, their fatty tissues store a number of unusual molecules that give their meat its distinctive taste. These include unique fatty acids their livers produce in response to microbes in their rumen (the first part of an animal’s alimentary canal where fermentation starts on the grasses and plants such ruminants eat).

As well, lamb and sheep fat stores thymol from the plants they digest, the same molecule that gives thyme its distinct aroma. So maybe my old dog just hated the smell of thyme.

Thymol is also part of the same family of chemicals found in plants, called terpenes, that generate the unique aromas of rosemary, mint and others. Ergo the use of these herbs with lamb.

In terms of the strength of flavours, generally grass or forage feeding results in stronger-tasting meat than grain or concentrate feeding, as in feedlots. This is because of plants’ high content of various odourous substances, along with fatty acids and chlorophyll, that the above-mentioned rumen microbes turn into relatives of the above-mentioned terpenes.

And you thought it was all in the cooking.

But regardless of what you do to it or how long you cook it, you still can’t make lamb out of mutton for one simple reason: The flavour carried in fat gets stronger as the animal gets older, since more of the flavour compounds are put into storage. Ergo our preference for a tender, succulent lamb over a greasy old sheep.

Notice that it was my mother’s generation — and those before hers — who even consider mutton, and that says oodles about our modern lifestyle.

McGee has an explanation for that, too. He describes the two traditional ways of obtaining meat from animals that hearken back to ancient times.

One was to raise animals primarily for their value while they’re alive — hens for their eggs; cows, sheep and goats for their milk and wool; and horses and oxen for their ability to share the workload, drawing carts, ploughing fields.

These animals were only killed when they were no longer productive, generating the rural style of meat — relatively tough and lean but flavourful meat from well-exercised, mature animals. Of course the Industrial Revolution, with all its attendant machines, changed all that, so only a few oldsters can recall slowly cooking real ox tail or a leg of mutton or old cow to break down the muscle and deliver a tasty, lean meal.

On the other hand, you can also track back to ancient times an urban style of meat. It is based on the idea of animals raised exclusively for food, which means feeding them well, sparing them — horror of horrors — unnecessary exercise, and slaughtering them young for their tender, mild, fatty flesh.

Egyptians and Romans were adept at raising such urban-style meat for an elite who could afford such luxuries. Which pretty much puts us where we are today: elitists one and all, who can afford most anything, including a fresh, succulent leg of lamb, perfect for Easter dinner. Enjoy it with loved ones.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who never met a lamb chop she didn’t like.