Casserole weather, shank you very much
THE run of 28C days the week before last, followed by a downpour and rapid cooling brought on heating, puffer jackets — and thoughts of slowly cooking casseroles.
Lamb shanks would be the thing I decided, but a crucial beat behind everyone else. One of my local butchers (Cygnet boasts two stand-alone butchers) Rob Wallace of R & D Meats, had just two left. There had been a run on them, he told me. Even the frozen stock had walked out the door into the wind and rain.
When I was growing up, lamb shanks were an afterthought, not the star of the show. The shank came attached to the Sunday leg of lamb, and I don’t remember anyone making strenuous efforts to bags it. These days, I prefer the fine, sweet meat of the shank.
The Sunday leg of lamb, with baked potatoes and pumpkin served with gravy and mint sauce was a staple in more homes than mine. Laurel Evelyn Dyson in her 2002 book How to Cook a Galah says the great Australian baked dinner “is really more than just a meal, but also an icon of traditional values, of families gathered together around Mum’s good cooking in a ritual reaffirmation of familial bonds”. In her history of Australian cooking, Dyson writes that the boast of “meat three times a day” was used to lure migrants from the UK in the 19th century. It was effective advertising if your diet consisted of bread, gruel, potatoes, pease pudding and cheese.
However, colonial eating could be a “muttonous” diet. She quotes Edward Curr writing in the 1840s in Recollections of Squatting in Victoria that the “rarely varied meal of tea, mutton and damper made its appearance on the table three times a day with such dyspeptic regularity that I used to loathe the sight of it”. Even the consumption of sheep meat three times a day did not make much of a dint in the supply before the first export of frozen meat in 1880. Up until then, sheep excess to requirements were boiled down for tallow. Dyson writes that just the tongues and hind legs were saved and in the 1840s the legs could be bought for 5 shillings (50c) a dozen from the boiling works. Salted, they were used to victual ships.
Queenslanders were the biggest meat eaters at the end of the 19th century, getting through 168kg each a year. Lamb was the cheapest meat then, followed by beef, then pork. Chicken was more expensive than crayfish and it was not until the 1960s that chicken production increased 20-fold as intensive farming began that the price dropped.
Australians still are big meat-eaters — at 110kg a year each on average — but now lamb is the least of it. In For the
Love of Meat Matthew Evans gives statistics that lamb comprises just 9.4kg of that — with beef at 22.8kg, pork 25kg (mostly bacon and smallgoods) and chicken 45kg.
Even 30 years ago, Rob was selling entire sides of lamb for $6.99. Now lamb costs less than beef but more than pork or chicken. The cost of a leg of lamb — beyond $40 — is only one of the reasons it no longer is a Sunday lunch staple. If lamb is on the menu, it may be in a Greek recipe, Middle Eastern, French, English, German, Mongolian, Korean or Moroccan.
Rob buys his meat as whole carcasses and breaks them down himself, but there are just not enough cutlets or shanks per carcass to meet demand, so he buys in boxes of these.
Barbecue-style cutlets are popular year round, but Rob was not expecting customers to want to be cosying up with a casserole in November — hence the shank shortage.