A Little Lamb

We had a very pleasant Christmas, though apparently the Halloween snowstorm used up our snow quota for some time – I saw maybe three or four flakes on Christmas morning, but by and large the past two months have been a tale of unfulfilled threats of snow. (If it could stay that way until my road test, I’d be much obliged.) Otherwise, presents were exchanged, a lot of food was cooked and eaten, and very long-distance Skype calls were made. As Christmases go, not bad.

The cat, realising she was not the centre of attention for once, endeavoured to reposition herself in it.

The main obstacle to the Christmas I envisioned was getting my hands on the cut of lamb I wanted. My knowledge of American lamb-eating habits was formed, before I came here, largely by the memory of protests against tariffs imposed on Australian and New Zealand lamb imports back around the turn of the millennium – at the time, I walked past the American embassy to school every day, so news about people protesting outside it (they generally didn’t do so before eight in the morning, when I was passing by) caught my attention. The American embassy is notable in Wellington for being the only embassy you’d need an army to get into, built in the high Cold War Bunker style of architecture. Other embassies range from “high-class hotel security” to “a quick jump over the nominal fence”, making razor-wire-topped three-metre-high-fences and a mad scientist’s worth of satellite dishes rather noticeable.

I assumed, naturally, that lamb was something Americans actually ate. As it turns out, however, the tariffs appear to have been imposed because American lamb farmers were fighting for a very small market indeed. According to the USDA, most Americans eat no lamb at all. The average consumption is 0.74 pounds per person per year, which is basically one or two chops, or would be if they regularly sold chops, which they don’t. This is reflected in our local supermarket, which generally has  a few whole legs of (largely Australian) lamb, frenched racks, the occasional cheap packet of neck chops, and very rarely some horrendously expensive leg chops. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is significantly more turkey than lamb. And there’s no mutton whatsoever (though rabbit quite often makes an appearance, and trout, which isn’t even legal to sell in supermarkets back home if I recall correctly, so there you go.)

Up until we got here, I hadn’t actually realised how much I liked lamb. It’s customary in New Zealand to complain often about how expensive lamb is and how it’s all sent overseas and we can’t afford to ever eat it, not like in the Good Old Days (which has a lot of truth to it; I’ve seen New Zealand lamb in Britain cheaper, on a cost-of-living basis, than in New Zealand supermarkets, and according to the USDA fact page above we export 80% of our lamb.) But we still eat a lot more of it than Americans; the latest firm statistic I could find was for 2001, in which we ate, on average, about 10kg of lamb and 7kg of mutton each a year. Leaving aside the mutton, that’s nearly thirty times more lamb than the average American. I don’t think I ate that much lamb, and I definitely wasn’t eating that much mutton, but between mince and stewed neck chops and the odd barbeque and very occasionally a roast, we were consuming a respectable quantity. I’d just not noticed.

Now I can’t actually get lamb, unless I want to eat very large quantities of it or I’m lucky enough to find it when they have more reasonably-sized cuts (we’ve actually ended up buying a whole leg and chopping it into two-person-sized quantities ourselves, because it’s the only semi-economical way to go about things) I miss it. Naturally, this meant I determined I would cook an old family favourite recipe for Christmas which called for a butterflied lamb shoulder. I went looking; I figured that the supermarket might be deficient, but there had to be somewhere stocking it.

Our local area is – oddly enough – devoid of specialist butchers (or greengrocers, come to that), and even the more specialist-organic-hippie places like Trader Joe’s have very little lamb indeed (I didn’t check Whole Foods, but that’s because Mike refuses to set foot in the place after our first visit, an attitude I have some sympathy with.)

We even drove down to a Mad Butcher-style place in the Springfield area; no dice. They had even less lamb than the supermarket. Lamb, at least in this area, is just not a goer. I ended up settling for what did show up in the supermarket a week before Christmas – a butterflied lamb leg, which to be honest cooked up just as well as the shoulder would have. And it was delicious.

The problem is – it’s the holiday season, the time of year (weather aside) that we’d normally be having barbeques…now I have a terrible craving for chops. One more reason to make plans to visit home, I think. (Or possibly the western US, where they farm all the lamb. Surely there’s some out there.)