“I? No, indeed! I thought of you.”
“Then I would rather wait. I see some cabbages down at the end of the garden. I have longed to taste nice cabbage for months.”
“You vulgar little person!”
“You won’t say so when you eat it.”
“No, but I shan’t eat it, my dear. I’ve too much respect for my digestion.”
“What a pity!”
Notwithstanding Harry’s determination, Molly went for a cabbage, and told Marta to put it in water. Then Molly took the fore-quarter of lamb, and with a sharp knife she made a deep incision, just where the neck ends and the shoulder begins, carrying the knife round nearly in a circle, always cutting as deeply as possible until the shoulder was free from the quarter. She had now before her the breast and rack, or ribs, the scrag, and the shoulder,—a nice, neat joint. All she had allowed the butcher to do to the quarter was to joint the chops and crack the breast across in the usual way, but not to touch the shoulder.
Molly had seen this process of removing the shoulder so often in Europe (where it is a very choice joint), that she had felt sure she could manage it. She knew that the great thing was to have the shoulder as thick as possible, therefore the knife must cut to the rib bones, and yet that the circle traced by the knife should go only within three inches of the edge on the rib side or back, and follow the line of the breast on the front, so that there remained five or six rib chops with the fat upon them, and several from under the shoulder up to the scrag, which would be excellent “French chops,” ready trimmed,—she would only have to scrape the bone.
To-day, however, she only separated the breast and cut off three rib chops, and trimmed them ready for breakfast, then put them away with the meat, leaving the shoulder out for dinner. It weighed about three and a half pounds, and would take, being lamb, which must be so well done, an hour and a quarter to cook. She set Marta to peel half a dozen potatoes of medium size, while she set the shoulder on a wire stand in a dripping-pan, then shook a little flour over it and rubbed a little salt on the skin. Molly had profited too well by her cooking-school lessons to think of putting salt on the flesh of meat before cooking, when it would draw out the gravy. When the potatoes were peeled and washed, she put them in the dripping-pan under the meat, and for fear enough fat should not drop from the joint to prevent the potatoes from becoming hard and dry before they browned, she laid the scraps of fat she had cut from the breakfast chops upon them. It was both young and fat lamb,—had it not been, Molly would not have risked the strong taste of lamb that is nearly mutton, on potatoes, nor the hard, whitish dryness of those cooked under lean meat.