It started, like so many great love affairs, in Paris. Though Toronto food stylist and cookbook author Jennifer McLagan grew up in Melbourne, Australia—a.k.a. sheep country—sipping Scotch broth and playing jacks with real sheep knuckles, she never much cared for lamb. “By the time I left, I couldn’t eat the stuff. It was so cheap, so plentiful, and most of it had that wet-sweater touch to it.” Years later, she visited Paris and tasted agneau de lait—lamb so young it had not yet been weaned from its mother’s milk.

Lamb in this country is marketed under a larger umbrella, and most sheep aged 12 months or younger qualify. While many of us think of the Danforth or Little Italy as the epicentre for freshly roasted lamb, newly immigrated Muslims have overtaken Greek and Italian demand. The result is that the market for Ontario lamb has grown by nearly 30 per cent in the last decade. Nevertheless, milk-fed lamb—slaughtered between 40 and 60 days of age—is relatively rare, difficult to find at most butchers. To gourmets, it is the acme of sheep. Which makes sense: the younger the animal, the more tender and mild its meat.

Not one to shy from a challenge (her Koreatown loft is filled with hard-to-grow lemon and fig trees), McLagan returned from her trip to Paris determined to find milk-fed lamb at home. She visited sheep farmer Elisabeth Bzikot at her Best Baa stall at the St. Lawrence Farmer’s Market. Naturally raised on a farm northwest of Orangeville, Best Baa lambs are generally slaughtered between four and six months of age. Bzikot tries to sell as much of each animal as she can—everything from necks for braising to offal for broth. She was only too happy to oblige McLagan in her quest for a younger specimen—provided she buy the whole beast. (Milk-fed lamb is sold at a premium, about $9 per pound, because it costs nearly as much to raise as a lamb twice its age and weight.)

Freezing what couldn’t be eaten immediately, McLagan and her husband, Haralds Gaikis, ate their way through the entire animal. The eyes of the rack chops were smaller than walnuts—each one a perfect individual portion. She roasted the legs, braised the shoulders and barbecued the liver, heart and kidneys. The head, split in half, crowned a Moroccan couscous. (Among aficionados, hard-to-find lamb brains are prized for their buttery texture. On the rare occasions that Mathew Sutherland gets them at his restaurant Fat Cat Bistro, his best customers receive a personal phone call.) The only part that McLagan could not bring herself to eat were the eyeballs. “They might be considered a delicacy, but they were just beyond me.”

Currently researching the history of the fat-tailed sheep, McLagan has an insatiable curiosity about food and its esoterica. Her cookbook collection requires a ladder to reach the top shelf, and she’ll clamber onto a chair in a three-star Michelin restaurant in Paris to photograph her meal for posterity. After years of styling boneless, skinless pieces of meat for Canadian food magazines, she was inspired to create a cookbook that championed cooking meat on the bone. Published last fall, her eccentric Bones: Recipes, History and Lore offers detailed instructions on preparing everything from marrow pudding to lamb neck. It garnered glowing reviews in both The New York Times and The Globe and Mail.

McLagan urges her readers to abandon their squeamishness when it comes to meat. “We’ve become so disconnected from the process,” she says, flipping through the encyclopedic River Cottage Meat Book—full of graphic pictures of slaughter—before dashing to the kitchen to turn a venison shank braising in red wine and rosemary.

Lamb is one of the few meats we still commonly eat on the bone; it may be the last holdout in the age of prepackaged convenience. It still comes into the butcher whole, so you can get all the odd parts. Even when we buy our premium meat boneless, as McLagan is keen to point out, we’re still paying for the bones and offal—and for someone to remove them.

Inspired by McLagan—and my own experience of eating agneau de Pauillac (young lamb from the Bordeaux appellation)—I visited my favourite local butcher: Cumbrae’s. Stephen Alexander agreed to sell me a few cuts of milk-fed lamb because he had other customers who had pre- ordered (like Bzikot, he usually sells them whole, for approximately $250). I roasted a rack and leg and braised the neck. It was half as fatty as that of an older lamb and twice as tender. “The real trick to good milk-fed lamb is having the farmer pick the stocky ones with good breeding,” Alexander says. “Otherwise, they can be bony.”

McLagan loved her little lamb from Best Baa, and loved the challenge of cooking an entire animal. “Yet it still didn’t have that French taste,” she sighs. “That faintly salty, herbal touch.” Here, where winter turns to summer almost overnight, and the grass is never as green as it is in England, France and New Zealand, lamb may be as tender as the first shoots of spring, but it rarely takes on an herbal quality. Tant pis.

We’ll always have Paris.

Where to Buy It
Best Baa, St. Lawrence Farmer's Market, 92 Front St. E., 519-848-5694
Cumbrae's, 481 Church St., 416-923-5600