Lamb shanks - provençal and otherwise

"After a good run as the darling of the gastropub circuit, this juicy little cut has slipped back into the shadows again. Too bad; few pieces of meat have so much going for them." Nigel Slater

So how did they turn out - my Provençal lamb shanks for David? Well pretty good actually. In spite of my saying yesterday that Richard Olney's recipes were not simple, this one actually was. And it also tasted surprisingly delicious. It even almost looked like it was supposed to. The sauce was not as orangey looking as in the picture above - but I'm telling myself they doctored it, but otherwise pretty much like that. And because it was so basic and simple I was a bit nervous of it being bland. But it, and the vegetables were surprisingly tasty - and the meat was juicy and tender too. Whenever I've tackled lamb shanks before they have always been a bit tough.

I found that Olney actually has two versions of this dish - one in Provence the Beautiful Cookbook and one in Simple French Food. I used the first one which is pictured above. Simple French Food has no photographs. The version I made is said to be from the département of Var, which is what David wanted, and is where Olney lived, so I'm assuming it is authentically from there.

BEQUETS AU FOUR (BAKED LAMB SHANKS)

4 lamb shanks

salt

pinch of Herbes de Provence

1 tablespoon olive oil

16 garlic cloves unpeeeled

2 carrots, peeled and cut into 2.5 cm pieces

2 onions, coarsely chopped

1/2 cup dry white wine

Preheat an oven to 200ºC.

Sprinkle the shanks with salt and herbs and rub them with olive oil. Place in a roasting pan and roast for 30 minutes

Remove the shanks from the oven and reduce the oven temperature to 150ºC. Transfer the shanks to a lidded oven casserole and add the garlic, carrots and onions. Sprinkle with a little salt. Pour off the fat in the roasting pan and place the pan over high heat. Pour in the wine and deglaze the pan, scraping the pan bottom with a wooden spoon until all the browned bits dissolve. Pour the deglazing juices over the contents of the casserole and cover.

Place in the oven and bake until the shanks are tender, about 1 1/2 hours.

The unpeeled garlic cloves are squeezed and spread on bread at table. After long cooking, they are transformed into a sweet purée.

SOURIS AUX AULX (SHANKS WITH GARLIC)

Souris means mice in French - it's what the French call lamb shanks - well it's what we saw them called. Don't ask me why they call them mice.

I'm not giving the whole recipe here. Suffice to say there are no vegetables (carrots and onions). Otherwise the ingredients are more or less the same. The method is slightly different in that it is not cooked in the oven but is very slowly stewed on top of the stove after a quick toss in the oil and garlic + a bit of salt. Then slowly cooked with the occasional bit of water to stop it burning. The herbs are added after about an hour. The wine is used to deglaze the pan after the meat is finished, and then put through a sieve with the garlic. You then return the meat to the liquid and finish with a grinding of pepper. Not quite the same, and I suspect the lack of vegetables is a loss. Also not adding the wine until the end.

I served them with a tomatoey potato gratin, which was not all that good for some reason, and these green beans - Haricots Verts à la Provençales. Also a minor disappointment, which is not to say they were not good, but just not as good as I hoped. So maybe I should avoid Richard Olney. No, the lamb shanks were very good.

But to return to Nigel Slater's statement that lamb shanks have gone out of fashion. Well he is writing in England, and maybe they have there, though looking at the internet offerings from England for lamb shanks you will find all the major chefs have some sort of recipe. Here in Australia I don't think they have gone out of fashion, though what would I know - I don't eat out very often. In the supermarket though they are readily available. I do not think they were many years ago. They used to be one of those foods for the poor - like oxtail and rabbit - now super trendy and expensive. The lamb shanks were hardly cheap either. In fact now that I think about it, they were more expensive than leg of lamb per kg.

And it seems that the world of the gourmet has recently discovered that just about every cuisine in the world has a way of cooking lamb shanks. I suspect that in some of those cuisines the original might have been goat shanks, but still, google lamb shanks and you get an almost endless choice of how to cook them - well slowly and long always, but what you put with them and serve them with is the thing that changes.

Anyway, my attempt was good enough to tempt me to try some other way another time. Before this, I have to say, I had sort of given up on them in my mind. This was one last throw at achieving the desired result.