General tips for cooking lamb
When it comes to cooking lamb remember two hallowed words: garlic and rosemary. Whatever cut you choose for dinner, slather it in some sort of fat to seal in juices, and then, garlic and rosemary. Salt and pepper of course. Cook appropriate to the cut. That’s it really and truly. Sure, there’s plenty more you can do. There always is. But for those of you less experienced with lamb or less than enthused about scouring pintrest for recipe ideas for hours, garlic and rosemary never fails.
A brown gravy from those pan drippings never fails either. But you probably already knew that.
Why you may never have eaten lamb before
The US did, at one time, grow and eat a ton of sheep. Especially when we relied on the animals to provide both wool and meat we readily raised them. But lamb production in the US has been on the decline since World War II. Ever wonder why? Other than a reduction in the need for wool, here’s one big reason: Mutton (meat from a sheep 2+ years old) was canned during WWII and eaten regularly by the soldiers. Who wants canned meat much less all the time? Our soldiers came back home and didn’t want another bite. Around the same time beef and pork production became more efficient and streamlined and thus more affordable. The new US trend was set in motion. Nowadays the national sheep flock is one tenth the size that it was pre-WWII.
They are making a bit of a comeback though, I think. These days most lamb meat sales are direct from farmer to customer. That means the flocks are small and local. That’s the best kind of food production there is anyway, right?
