FOOD; The Science of the Lambs

The best roast goat I ever ate was served from a copper tray at a villa high in the mountains above Muscat, the capital of Oman, the reclusive sultanate that stretches some 2,000 miles along the Arabian Sea and whose opulent past enriches its modern culture with soft infusions of ancient colors, textures and tastes. Even today you can walk along the shore at Salala, the port that served the China trade, and find undisturbed shards of age-old porcelain strewn on the beach, or you can wait in the city's modern airport beside a young Bedouin woman in a silver, birdlike half-mask, the silken cuffs of her French blouse visible against hennaed wrists beneath her smart black caftan.

I had eaten roast goat many times before in Hispanic restaurants in the United States and in Mexico, where the villagers still wrap the quartered animal in banana leaves (as our Omani chef did), tie it in a basket of palm fronds and bury it overnight in a smoldering fire pit so that on the following day the spiced meat falls away in caramelized shreds. This fire-pit cookery was probably brought to the New World by the conquistadors, whose ancestors had themselves been conquered some 700 years earlier by Muslim Arabs whose desert cuisine, along with their genes, had mingled for centuries with Spain's. And it is this cooking, introduced by the gold-crazed Spaniards as they stumbled toward what is now Kansas, that may have been the ancestor of today's slow-cooked barbecue -- the brash New World descendant of our Omani chef's fugue of melted dates, powdered cloves, cardamom, cumin, cinnamon and black pepper.

New World goat in the Hispanic style can be agreeable when it is served moist and not overdone, but the meltingly tender goat my wife and I consumed in Oman on that April afternoon when the apricot blossoms trembled in the clear air against an impossibly blue sky is nothing like it. As we ate, I was reminded of another April day in 1954 in Rome, when I first encountered the slow-roasted unweaned lamb that the Romans call abbacchio, which has haunted my memory ever since and whose traditional method of preparation must have descended intact from the Arab or perhaps Indian original.

This way of cooking so that the meat melts from the bone like that of a braised lamb shank rather than the traditionally pink leg of lamb, must have been practiced long before recorded history, when fuel was more valuable than time. Parsimonious chefs conserved the heat of a wood fire by smothering the flames with earth and relying upon the stone lining of the pit to release its stored heat gradually throughout the night. Today this ancient technique can be approximated by slow braising in a heavy, covered pot either in the oven or atop the stove, which is how the Roman cooks probably prepare abbacchio. It is how Marcella Hazan in her ''Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking'' recommends it be done today.

Goat and lamb are interchangeable in Omani cuisine, but unweaned lamb is the traditional Easter dish in southern Europe, though not always braised slowly in the Arab or Roman style. My friend Frank Migliore, who with his brother Dom runs Dom's Fine Foods on Lafayette Street and who sells young lambs at Easter, as well as buffalo mozzarella delivered every Wednesday fresh from Naples along with dry aged beef and homemade sausage, prefers baby lamb the way his Neapolitan father made it: browned in a little olive oil or lard, roasted quickly with garlic and rosemary and served medium-rare. Frank is an inspired cook. But because baby lamb has little flavor of its own, I prefer the more intense Roman version.

To prepare the lamb in either the Neapolitan or Roman style is simple, but first the cook must deal with the question of squeamishness, for guests tend to react to baby lamb as if it were the family poodle. Surely it is not an act of kindness to kill an innocent lamb, but neither is it kind to kill the innocent pigs and cattle that supply the B.L.T.'s and Big Macs that we thoughtlessly devour by the billion. Human beings are omnivores who in their various cultures -- or under extreme conditions in any culture -- will kill and eat almost anything, including one another. In China, where snake soup is a popular restorative, the chow dog (as in chow mein or chow line) was bred for the wok; while rats, according to the novelist Patrick O'Brian, were avidly hunted and eaten by Royal Navy midshipmen at sea during the Napoleonic Wars and surely by their counterparts in other navies throughout history. In my own New York neighborhood, live frogs stare pathetically upward from barrels in the fish markets along Mott and Grand Streets, unaware of the cleaver that awaits them, while the French joyously swallow entire buntings in a single bite. Selective squeamishness should be ignored. Only avowed vegetarians are entitled to deplore well-prepared infant lamb for reasons of conscience, but their complaint, though perhaps exemplary, will not spare the life of a single creature at Easter.