Salt marsh lamb ◆

Agneau de pré-salé

What it is

The appellation requires the lambs to spend most of their lives on the herbus of the bay, grazing sea purslane and samphire washed by the tide — it is the halophyte plants that put iodine into the fat, not salt settling on the grass. Shepherds still walk the flocks out between tides, and the animals learn the channels.

In the kitchen

Do not salt it and do not stud it with garlic — the fat is already saline and iodised, and that fat is what you paid for. Whole gigot at 160 °C to 55 °C in the centre, then twenty minutes of rest; the pré-salé character reads at the end of the rest, not out of the oven.

Goes with

Samphire Butter Thyme Garlic Flageolet Olive oil Shallot Parsley

Same species

Pauillac lamb Sisteron lamb Lamb fries Lamb brain Leg of lamb Lamb

In season alongside

Whelk Abalone Ark shell Japanese abalone Hind Bleu de Termignon

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