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Lamb With Cos Lettuce Casserole
This week's recipe should certainly bring out the envy in your friends. The spring lambs are just now coming into season, and dishes such as this will be adorning Greek tables all over the country in the next few weeks.
In recent weeks, on our tour of Mediterranean cooking, we have reached the heart of the region's cuisine: the olive and its oil.
Last week I mentioned some of the supposed virtues, secular and religious, that have been ascribed to olive oil over the centuries.
But probably the most important use of the oil has been not the string of folk remedies, nor the supposed sacred uses, nor even the culinary uses that people like me tend to extol; it has probably been the use as fuel that gave the poor peasants light during the years before the advent of electric power.
But then again, there are other peasants who will tell you that the most important use was simply keeping the community reproducing healthily: in the days before 'little blue pills', olive oil was commonly supposed to be associated with aphrodisiac qualities.
"Fae lathi k'ela vrathi: eat olive oil if you are to come and spend the night", says the old Greek proverb, suggestively.
On the whole, Mediterraneans are extremely superstitious, particularly
regarding the notorious 'evil eye'.
This is all tied up with a strangely fatalistic view of causation, and the notion that you can 'tempt fate'.
For instance, if someone comments on how fit and healthy a child is, and the child then falls ill, it is because of the evil eye.
If someone admires your smart suit, and then later that day you catch it on a fence and tear it, again the evil eye has been at work.
The implication of the evil eye is that the admirer had a hidden envy in the first place, with the logical consequence that the person in question becomes undesirable and is treated with suspicion.
An extension of this tradition is found in the Middle East. When I first visited friends there, I once quite innocently admired somebody's watch – and was amazed when they took it off and offered it to me!
It seems that even the 'coveted' article becomes tainted. Far better to give it away and lose it than to have the bad fortune associated with it follow you around!
This week's recipe should certainly bring out the envy in your friends. The spring lambs are just now coming into season, and dishes such as this will be adorning Greek tables all over the country in the next few weeks.
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Lamb With Cos Lettuce Casserole
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INGREDIENTS (serves 4)
1 medium-sized, boned shoulder of lamb, carefully trimmed of fat and cut into 1inch/2cm cubes
2 bunches spring onions, trimmed and chopped
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1.5 pints/900ml hot water
salt
3 tbsp chopped fresh dill
3 large cos lettuce, washed and shredded
3 eggs
juice of 2 large lemons
METHOD
1. Saut the onions briefly in the oil. Add the meat and continue to saut together for four minutes. Add water and salt. Cover and cook for 40 minutes until the meat is tender. Add the dill and lettuce, cover and cook gently for ten minutes, then leave to stand for five minutes.
2. Lightly beat the eggs with the lemon juice and gradually add 3-4
tablespoons of the hot (not boiling) cooking liquid, beating continuously.
3. Pour the sauce over the meat and lettuce and stir well. Return to a very gentle heat for one to two minutes to warm through and serve.
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Weather for Bedford
Sunday 27 May 2012
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