Christmas Lamb from the Country Cooking of France

I ended up doing a wonderful seven hour lamb from one of my new cookbook's, the Country Cooking of France. Lots of root vegetables, easy to make, and delicious once it's on the table. The only thing is, you need literally seven hours to make it. Because it cooks at such a low temperature (275 degrees F), it takes that long, but turns out spoon tender. Yes, that's right, spoon-tender. You can take this apart with a spoon when you serve it.



The cookbook is excellent, by the way. I thought it might be one of those "pretty-but-no-good recipes" books. You know the kind -- all the recipes are too involved or too contrived from exotic ingredients that you know you'll never try them. There are a couple of those, but it is also full of really good recipes that anyone can make. A few minor critiques, though. I hated having to flip back and forth to the end of the book to look up the recipes for staple items (like sweet tart dough). I understand why they did it, but it is difficult to do when one's hands are all sticky or covered in dough. Second, the book is obsessed with veal stock. It would be nice to recognize that not everyone has an easy supply of veal bones around to make this and offered some suggestions of adequate replacements. Can I use beef stock, or will it be too strong? What about chicken stock?

These are really quibbles, though. Although the list price is $50, you can get this book from Amazon or Jessica's buscuit (link above) for about $30, and I think it is well worth it. I'm getting pretty tired of seeing celebrity chefs and others put out cookbooks with 75 or 100 recipes in them. For $25 or more, we should get more than that (I mean you, Ted Allen -- whom I don't trust to make toast anyway, Bobby Flay, and Mark Bittman, who respectively have put out books with 100, 100 and 75 recipes in them in recent years). Now, before I go off the deep end, I should say that both Bobby Flay (particularly Boy Meets Grill, despite its paltry 125 recipes) and Mark Bittman (his Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking is the only fish cookbook I need) have put out excellent cookbooks previously, but when I look at a cookbook, I know that at least half the recipes are going to hold no interest for me or seem too complex or not worth the effort to make. So that leaves 50 or fewer recipes in a cook book I would even consider making. For that money, I could subscribe to Gourmet, Food and Wine, or Bon Appetit (actually, the first and last I do get) together and get more recipes.