Good fellow: A lamb shoulder cooked with spices, olives and potatoes. Five hours in the oven!

Don’t call a lamb from the lovely French region of Lozère just another lamb. It really is much more and you can taste it. Forget about those deep-frozen guys shipped around the world from New Zealand (nothing against NZ!). A Lozère lamb, nicely prepared, will offer rare culinary pleasures, amazing texture, and a sound taste.

I cooked this one in the oven – a lamb shoulder from a Parisian expert butcher in the tiny Rue du Pas-de-la-Mule – for five hours at 120°C (250°F). I was in the mood to daringly season the dish with lots of herbs and spices: grains of coriander, cumin, fennel and more, olives, of course, some dried tomatoes, roasted red peppers and the very edgy piment d’Espelette, a spice you should definitely discover if you didn’t know it yet. In the end, I added generous pinches of Maldon salt which a friend brought as a gift the other day. Excellent. The family enjoyed it.

See the black iron cast casserole: it’s my favorite cook pot for larger pieces.