Grilled lamb chops with rosemary and lemon sauce / Costeletas de Borrego com Alecrim e Limão

Grilled loin lamb chops bring together flavour, tenderness and texture in a delicious dish that can be served with roast or fried potatoes, rice or couscous. In Portugal, these exquisite cuts of meat are simply grilled or fried with simple seasoning to enhance the flavour of the meat. Sintra, the ultimate romantic destination to the north of Lisboa, is renowned for excellent quality lamb and high quality butchers.

As with all Portuguese gastronomy, the main objective is to showcase the freshness and quality of the main ingredients through simple flavours and cooking processes. This recipe calls on rosemary (alecrim) and lemon to gently flavour a perfectly seasoned lamb cutlet. The simplicity is deceiving as the herb is at the core of an ancient dispute with marjoram (marjoram) recounted by António José da Silva in the play “Guerras do alecrim e manjerona” (Wars of rosemary and marjoram) performed at Teatro do Bairo Alto de Lisboa in the carnival of 1737. Coincidently, the “war” is said to be associated with Sintra so one would readily speculate that the dispute was about lamb chop seasoning… Incidentally, this recipe aligns with the alecrim side… the marjoram reprise might well come soon…

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BBQ/Churrasco

Now, BBQ is a big topic! Once you get over the Anglo-Saxon obsession with cooking cheap and nasty bangers and burgers on what is possibly the best cooking method – grilling over lump-wood charcoal. The three letter word starts to become more useful. In Portugal, churrasco or grelhados ao carvão is often synonym with extremely fresh food, simply seasoned and cooked to perfection.The terminology is itself ambiguous and the words “assar” and “grelhar” are used interchangeably depending on the ingredients (e.g. sardinhas assadas, peixe grelhado)! Let’s keep it ambiguous!