Aotearoa and Australia · Volume 02, The Ration, the Milk Bar and the Bush Table
Sunday roast lamb
Pastoral Australia
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour 15
- Researched
- Researched from 167 sources in the brief
Refrigerated shipping from the 1880s turned Australia's wool economy into a meat-exporting one as well, and lamb, cheap and abundant against the colony's own pastoral wealth, became the Sunday roast's default protein. This chapter is honest that the social history of exactly when and how the British Sunday roast became an Australian household fixture is far less well documented than the pastoral economics behind it, and treats the custom as inference from that economy plus general Anglo-Celtic settler practice rather than as independently verified social history.
As tradition built it
From The Australian Women's Weekly. Serves 6. About 1 hour 15 minutes.
Ingredients
- 2 kg leg of lamb
- 3 sprigs rosemary, chopped
- ½ tsp sweet paprika
- 1 kg potatoes
- 500 g pumpkin
- 3 small brown onions, halved
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 2 tbsp plain flour
- 250 ml chicken stock
- 60 ml dry red wine
Method
- Score the lamb at 2 cm intervals; season with rosemary and paprika.
- Roast at 200°C (180°C fan) for 15 minutes, then reduce to 180°C (160°C fan) for a further 45 minutes, or to taste.
- Add the potatoes, pumpkin and onion, tossed in olive oil, for the final 45 minutes.
- Deglaze the pan with flour, stock and wine into a gravy.
Notes
Serves six, around 1 hour 15 minutes total.
What a modern chef changes
This chapter's own extension, following the native-ingredient pairing logic documented at Vue de Monde, which crusts WA marron with Tasmanian mountain pepper, applied here to lamb rather than claimed as any named chef's own dish.
Rungs 1 and 5
Method
- Sous vide the lamb leg to a precise, controlled doneness, then finish hard and fast on a Big Green Egg for a proper crust, replacing the single long roast with two separate, better-controlled stages.
- Crust the finished lamb with ground Tasmanian mountain pepper, following the pairing logic Vue de Monde applies to marron, a genuinely Australian protein-and-spice match rather than a French one borrowed wholesale.
- Roast the pumpkin whole, then finish it dusted with vegetable ash, ground fine in a spice grinder after a hard Big Green Egg char, the ash technique from Rung 1 applied to a British-Australian side dish rather than a native one.