Born with a silver spoon?

Our next book is a large compendium of Italian recipes, written 'in the old style', that's to say, with a minimum of instruction.

In this case, though, the cause is not that the book itself is old, but that the publishers obviously wanted to have each recipe formatted to exactly half a page:

No doubt for some recipes, you can describe what to do in such a short space. For others, I'm not so sure. This recipe was actually quite well-written, although there were some puzzles. It's for a slow roasted leg of lamb, 'à la Périgourdine'. First puzzle: what does that mean? Literally, it means 'in the Périgord fashion'. Périgord is in France:

According to the internet, cooking something à la Périgourdine normally means preparing it using either foie gras or truffles. But this recipe has neither ingredient!

Anyway, McCaffrey's didn't have a bone-in leg of lamb, so I bought a butterflied leg and trussed it up:

The cooking started with browning the meat all over on the stove-top:

Then I poured a little brandy in the pan, and ignited it:

OK, at this point, Katherine took an amazing video of the pan flaming away. Except that I handed her the camera while it was actually filming and she didn't realise, so she pressed the record button (thus stopping the filming) and pressed it again at the end of the drama (thus starting it up again). Anyway, after that excitement, I added the aromatics: celery, onion, garlic, parsley, clove. Oh, I nearly forgot: and a full bottle of white wine:

All that was left to do was tent it up tightly, in preparation for its long roasting (in fact, isn't it really braising?):

OK, I was economical with the truth earlier on. I actually forgot to throw in the garlic with all the other aromatics, so I actually added the garlic after an hour and a half. And since the lamb was off the bone, we roasted it for a mere 4 hours, not 5. Out it came, and it was so tender it was just falling apart:

We did creamy mashed potatoes and crunchy beans in olive oil with salt and pepper too:

I strained the cooking juices and thereby got a beautiful jus, rather sharp (from the white wine) but very unctuous:

And in our haste to eat, we forgot to take pictures of the plated meal. But the dish was a success: surprisingly, it wasn't too rich. The other puzzle about the recipe is that they suggested that a good dish to accompany it would be zucchini purée. That sounded really good, but when I looked for the recipe in the book, there was none. Maybe it would be impossible to write the recipe in half a page, so they had to exclude it.