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Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Comfort food
Posted By Stephen Dark on August 11, 2009, 11:45 AM
When I lived in
I’d marinate the animal in red wine, rosemary, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper, the night before. At 4pm I’d stack some kindling around newspaper, light the latter, and build a mound of coal around it. I’d keep four mounds of ash-hot charcoal under the thickest parts of the lamb’s body and every half an hour feed more coals from an adjacent fire.
It was a gorgeous process, the smoke and smell of the cooking meat rising around me as I watched the beast drip fat through the bars to the coals below, my company a glass of Malbec or Merlot.
This Sunday I returned to that spectacle, accompanying a friend, Amir Haskic, as he prepared and spit-roasted a year-old lamb for five hours. His is a more complex process than mine. He fixed the lamb tightly with wire and buttressing forks to a pole, which he then plugged into a cog-driven motor that gently turned it over the fire. Haskic learned to spit-roast animals as a child in the woods of former Yugoslavia. Back then, though, he had to hand-crank it for hours on end.
Once the meat was closing to falling from the bone, Haskic took apart the carcass and served butter-tender slabs of lamb to the guests. For me the day’s highlight was rubbing bread over the beast as it turned on the spit. This was fat-soaked manna from heaven, or bread and dripping as my parents called it when I was a child in
Haskic’s motto is “Simple is always best.” When I bit down on the fat-drenched bread I had to agree.
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