Lamb Shoulder

The lamb needs to marinate overnight.

The essential ingredients for this Portuguese-inspired Indian dish are wine, vinegar, and garlic. Additions of mustard seeds, cumin, turmeric, and chiles make it specifically colonial Goan.

Sweet and tangy pomegranate juice brings a depth of flavor and rich color to this meltingly tender lamb stew. Serve with polenta or a grain salad and then nextover remaining lamb into sandwiches the next day.

A perfect cube is not essential, but try to get the lamb into roughly the same size pieces so they cook at the same rate.

Though Birrieria Zaragoza uses goat, this deeply spiced braise is equally good with lamb.

(Baha) Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Paula Wolfert's book Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco. Wolfert also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. If you really love the taste of lamb, you will love this dish. It's a pity that we Americans know so little about steaming meats; just as steamed vegetables keep their original flavors, so do steamed chickens and lamb. If you don't have a steamer, use a couscousière or a colander with a tight-fitting lid that fits snugly over a kettle. Some people think that steamed lamb looks unattractive (though no one denies that it's incredibly good). If you feel this way you may brown the meat quickly in butter or oil at the end, or roast it at high heat until it browns. Steamed food should be eaten the moment it is ready, when it is at its peak: if left too long, it will dry out.

Lamb is traditionally served at Easter in Italy as well as many other countries. Although author Gina Marie Miraglia Eriquez grew up with the roasted legs of lamb prepared by her mother and grandmother, she prefers to braise a lamb shoulder. The meat turns out so tender and succulent that it's impossible to slice with a carving knife. Instead, it's pulled with a meat fork into moist, rich chunks. Depending on where you live, lamb shoulder may require a special order so be sure to allow time for a butcher to request it.

At first glance, this might look like a simple lamb stew, but you will be delighted by its finesse when you remove the lamb from the bone, return it to the pot, and toss with your favorite pasta. The secret to this deep and succulent sauce is the Basic Fond de Veau , a reduced veal stock whose unctuousness is well worth the extra preparation. The lamb can be made ahead, to concentrate the flavors. This ragout makes a surprisingly satisfying dish for entertaining.

This is the stew that made such an impression on the final episode of the first season of Top Chef Masters. Each of us had been asked to create a meal that would be an autobiography told through the dishes we would present to the judges. I immediately thought of baeckeoffe ("baker's oven"). The name refers back to the time when bakers used wood-fired ovens. After the bread was done, this dish would be baked long and slow in the falling temperatures of the cooling oven. Since everyone in town would see the baker every day for the family's daily loaf, each would often bring a casserole to be baked in the oven. It was traditional, particularly on Mondays, when the women went to the river to do their laundry. They would have marinated their meats and vegetables overnight, dropped their casseroles off in the morning on their way, and then picked them up—plus a loaf of bread—on their way home. Even though my father was not the bread baker and had a modern, gasfired oven, people still took their casseroles to him. They liked to drop in because he always had some joke or story to tell. Before the village baker also invested in a modern oven and was still using wood, when my father turned over a fresh loaf of bread to give it the traditional blessing, he would sometimes see pieces of charcoal embedded in the crust. That would send my dad wild, muttering that "he [the baker] did not thoroughly clean his oven!" I make this dish often, both at home and at the restaurant. But these days we tend to increase the vegetables and use less meat, and sometimes we use only vegetables and leave out the meat entirely. While there is never a mushroom in the classic recipe, you can add them or make a vegetarian version with mushrooms and a rich vegetable stock. I've also made this stew as the centerpiece for Christmas dinner, adding plenty of sliced black truffles. The classic dish uses a mix of meats including a pig's foot, which gives a rich, gelatinous texture to the stew. You may be able to special-order a pig's foot. Ask the butcher to slice it crosswise into three pieces. But even at the restaurant I sometimes have trouble ordering them, and your stew will still be delicious without one. You can also use just one or two kinds of meat instead of all three.

Alain Ducasse— If you have cooking juices left over in the lamb casserole dish and it seems too much, put it back on the heat and reduce.
Paule Neyrat— In pearl barley all the husks have been removed. As a result it keeps its richness in carbohydrates but loses most of its vitamins and minerals. Fortunately, the vegetables make up for this.

This North African stew is named for the traditional dish it is cooked in. A tagine is a clay pot that consists of a shallow round base and a cone-shaped lid designed to allow all the moisture to flow back down into the base during cooking. The stews known as tagines are often thickened (and flavored) with dried fruits; the recipe here contains dried apricots, but prunes, raisins, and dates are also common. In France, tagines are often accompanied by couscous; while flatbread is more typical in Morocco. This is a nonbrowned stew, similar to the veal stew on page 205, though far simpler to prepare.