Kuzu kapama

Kuzu kapama is a Turkish spring lamb braise in which the meat is cooked under a lid of lettuce and spring onions until the greens have collapsed into the sauce and the lamb falls from the bone. The name means covered lamb, and the covering is the point: whole leaves of romaine or cos lettuce, bunches of spring onion and sometimes chard are laid over the meat so that it steams in their juice rather than in added stock. It is a dish of April and May, when the lamb is young and the first lettuce is in the market, and it belongs to home kitchens and to the esnaf lokantası tradesmen's restaurants of Istanbul and the Aegean rather than to kebab houses. It is eaten with rice pilav or bread and nothing else, and a cook who makes it well is judged on how little else is in the pot.