Jonathan Gold1. Julia Child's gigot a la moutarde. Bea Arthur's favorite, sure. But powdered ginger and pounded dried rosemary? Even on Easter, this one requires a leap of faith.
2. Chorizo-stuffed leg of lamb from Suzanne Goin's Sunday Suppers at Lucques. The Mexican-Moroccan-Provencal approach, of course. I'll get around to it someday.
3. Greek Easter leg of lamb from Michael Psilakis's How to Roast a Lamb. This year's marquee lamb dish, unless it was last year's: a kind of herbed lamb jelly roll stuffed with sun-dried tomatoes.
4. Simon Hopkinson's roast leg of lamb with anchovies, garlic and rosemary. Like everyone else, I've made this one a dozen times – the vast quantity of anchovies really does melt into the lamb, leaving behind nothing but pure umami.
5. Gigot a la Ficelle, from Richard Olney's Lulu's Provencal Table. Tie a string to the end of the shank and fix the other end to the fireplace mantle, suspend before a roaring bonfire of vinewood, give a good twirl and come back in two hours when it's done. I once almost bought a house because its massive fireplace seemed made for this dish. If it wasn't for the burros and sombreros carved into the ceiling beams, I might be living there today.
6. Mark Peel's Leg of Lamb with Rosemary from Mark Peel & Nancy Silverton at Home. Roast with 8 bunches of rosemary, then torch the herbs into flame. There's a reason people to go to Campanile to order this dish. They have fire extinguishers there.
Simon Hopkinton's leg of lamb; Credit: New York Times/Zachary Zavislak
7. Ambassade d'Auvergne's Seven Hour Leg of Lamb from Patricia Wells' Bistro Cooking. I have fond memories of this lamb, which the newspaper I used to write for first tested for an article on cookbook recipes that didn't work. There are a lot of recipes for seven hour lamb, but this one, unusually, is cooked at fairly high heat over a lot of vegetables. Still – seven hours is a long, long time.
8. Roast Leg of Lamb from Colman Andrews' Country Cooking of Ireland. Solid, if uncontroversial. Pretty much the garlic-intensive leg of lamb you'd be cooking if you didn't happen to be browsing through cookbooks, but rubbed with butter instead of olive oil and studded with thyme instead of rosemary.
9. Gigot a la Bordelaise, from Paula Wolfert's Cooking of South-West France. A duck-fat rub, lots of garlic, and an unusual roasting technique that involves taking the leg out for a few minutes of R&R halfway through the process. Very little not to like, actually.
10. James Beard's Spoon Lamb. Low, slow and endless, but you can spread the leftovers on toast.
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