Sheep in lamb's clothing: Is September the best time to eat lamb?
Sheep in lamb's clothing: Is September the best time to eat lamb?
Like most food, lamb is seasonal – and not at the time of year you think it is
More likely than not, Love Lamb Week – occurring on the first week of September as a way to promote the eating of seasonal, British lamb – completely passed you by this year. Hardly surprising, given the last posts on some of the campaign’s social media channels are from 12 months ago.
Be that as it may, Love Lamb Week is about the only thing (usually) doing the job of reminding people that lamb is a seasonal food, and is so on a schedule not remotely in line with general public consensus. In other words, forget springtime – September, it transpires, is the earliest you’d want to be eating lamb at its peak. It’s only due to Christian traditions, and namely the connotations of sacrifice and rebirth, do we think lamb should be eaten at Easter. In reality, having lamb at such a time of year is only really achievable in the UK if the meat is imported from somewhere like New Zealand, or raised on British farms indoors.
And hey, all that’s fine, provided you’re fine with it too. Ostensibly, you can get perfectly serviceable (though supposedly not as flavorful) lamb from 12,000 miles away if you’re happy to overlook what a distance like that entails (such as the disconnect with local and regenerative farmers, for example). Similarly, if you’re okay with eating lamb at basically the worst possible time – due to early-year weather, lambs of slaughtering age have barely been on any fresh grass from which their meat can develop decent flavour – then who am I to stop you.
If you however subscribe to the idea that food is best enjoyed as and when the unruly laws of nature would have it (thus discounting things like tomatoes in February, and parsnips in July), then hear this: To eat 100% grass-fed lamb at its peak, ask a butcher or farmer for new season lamb from September at the very very earliest. Although, if they’re farming or butchering breeds such as Herdwick, Romney, and Greyface Dartmoor, you might want to hold off for a bit longer. “Native breeds tend to take longer to get to slaughter weight than the commercial breeds do,” says Bronwen Davey, who rears Black Welsh Mountain sheep in east Somerset.
Though slower-growing, meat from native breeds tends to impart more flavour. Partly, that is, due to their fat content. Bronwen’s flock is mostly at least a year old by the time they reach the minimum weight for slaughter, and so aren’t technically lamb, but hogget. “The meat is a darker colour than lamb,” she says. “The flavour of the fat is outstanding.” But then, her sheep having had a full summer of grazing on what Bronwen calls “the sweetest, lushest, most nutrient grass,” it would.
Any sheep after two years of age starts to become mutton. Generally, the older a sheep gets, the more flavour it’ll carry. Older mutton in recent years has become a bit of a thing in London restaurants, particularly in the form of Cull Yaw (a Cornish way of referring to culling an unproductive ewe) as introduced by Cornish farmer Matt Chatfield.1 Matt’s ewes are at least seven years old, and get their flavour from grazing on diverse grasses and pulses and – very a-typically – in woodland. It’s such a one-of-a-kind product that Blacklock, Ikoyi, Kiln, BAO, and Smoking Goat compete to have it on their menus, and are, by extension, proving wrong prior assumptions that mutton is a dreary, stringy, piece of meat.
Though it’s not perfectly timely, Love Lamb Week makes more rational sense than basically any well known food-based or food-adjacent celebration in the British calendar. Trouble is, lots of tradition, stigma, and general confusion tends to get in the way of helping people enjoy lamb anywhere near its fullest potential, to the point where even the more educational and forward-thinking farms in Somerset are, at the moment, labelling hogget as lamb. If the former wasn’t a superior, better-tasting alternative to the latter, the public would feel deceived. Ironically, if anything they are being deceived, just less about the perception of quality, and more about the age of the meat on their plate.
Where to pick up seasonal lamb (sometimes lamb, usually hogget) in Somerset
Due to lamb being some way outside the Big Three Meats (about 5% of meat consumed in the UK is sheep meat – as much as 50% is poultry), options aren’t exactly overflowing in Somerset. But they aren’t massively limited either:
Black Sheep Meat Co. (sheep graze between Frome and Sparkford)
Redwoods Farm (Tiverton, but on the Somerset / Devon border)
Stream Farm (Bridgwater)
Pret a Portland (near Mere)
Edcombe Farm (Cheddar)
Fernhill Farm (The Mendips)
(Any other Somerset farms you might know about in that vein, do add in the comments)
Matt Chatfield, or ‘Matt the Chat’ as I affectionately know him, is incidentally making an appearance at Somerset-based food and farming conference LandAlive in November