Leg of Lamb with Flageolets (Gigot d’Agneau Flageolets)

Gigot d’agneau flageolets — leg of lamb with flageolet beans — is a classic of French home cooking. Frequently served for Easter, it’s wonderful anytime.

Our recipe, which is easier to put together than the lengthy recipe would suggest, stars an herb-and-garlic-filled boned leg of lamb that gets roasted, sliced and served on braised flageolets. Putting the whole thing together requires very little last-minute moves, so the dish is great for entertaining.

READ: Spring Feast, French-style: Leg of lamb with flageolet beans

The beans are soaked in the morning (if you’re serving the gigot for dinner) or the night before (if you’re serving it for lunch), and then simmered with aromatics. While the beans are soaking, you can prepare confit garlic cloves, then prep the lamb — applying a rub, rolling and tying it; the rub and its salt do their work while it rests. Meltingly tender with soft, deep garlic flavor, those garlic cloves are fantastic to have in the fridge (be sure to store them separately from the oil they cooked in), so we like to make more than we’ll need. You can skip that step and use crushed raw garlic in the rub, if you like. But we prefer the softer flavor of the confit, and it’s so easy to make.

Searing the lamb in a skillet before roasting it gives the outside nice caramelization; you plop the skillet right in the oven, and the searing step means there will be plenty of flavorful bits stuck to the pan, which you can then deglaze while the lamb is resting; you’ll add that delicious sauce to the beans.

Flageolets are one of our all-time favorite beans; we love the heirloom flageolets from Rancho Gordo, which are a pale green color before they’re cooked. The bean is creamy and tender, with wonderful flavor; it has been called the “caviar of beans.” We find that soaking them 4 to 6 hours is adequate — no need to soak them overnight. In fact, you don’t need to soak them at all; they’ll just take longer to cook if you skip the soak.

Our recipe calls for a small butterflied lamb of about 3 1/2 to 4 pounds (1.5 to 1.8 kilos); this is about what the boneless legs from New Zealand typically weigh. We actually prefer American lamb for its superior flavor and texture, and for the fact that’s it’s not flown halfway around the planet to get to us. Those legs are much larger; if you want to use one, great — just double the amount of filling for the lamb. You’ll need a very large sauté pan to hold it, and increase the cooking time.

In France, the dish would typically be served without any sauce, as the beans would be considered saucy enough. We love to pass our Tangy Green Everything Sauce with it.

Serves 5 - 6.

Ingredients

For STEP ONE OF the flageolets

1 pound / 454 g flageolets

Salt

Half an onion, peeled and studded with 3 cloves