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Agnolotti, a form of filled pasta popular in Italy’s Piedmont region, clearly has the Italian word for lamb, agnello, as its root. Even if that is not the case, lamb has been a popular meat in Italy since Roman times and has always served as a filling for stuffed pastas. We almost never see mutton mentioned in works on Italian cuisine. Even though Italy was (and remains) a major producer of wool and sheep’s cheese, the nation’s food historians never seem to mention what happened to the animals after they stopped producing wool and/or milk.

Indeed, half a century later, the British journalist Thomas Moffat described lamb as ‘of all others our best nourishment’: a resounding endorsement. Seventeenth-century Dutch recipes seem to hark back to the Middle Ages in interesting ways. The dish ‘Whole Haunch of Mutton in the English Manner with a Sauce’ contained the butter one would expect from a good English sauce, and capers, an exotic ingredient for both the British and the Dutch. A dish then called hutspot was a stewed whole haunch of sheep with a butter and artichoke sauce.

It was the same in Spain. The Romans brought their cuisine with them, and the Spanish traditions of eating bread, cheese, olives and wine all have their roots in the ancient Roman era. It was in Spain that the Jewish Sabbath dish of adafina has its roots. This stew of lamb, onions and chickpeas seems superficially similar to other traditional Spanish stews like the slow-cooked meat and bean stew olla podrida (a favourite of  Sancho Panza in Don Quixote), but in order to comply with kosher laws, olive oil was substituted for the traditional lard and lamb for pork.