Lamb

Le Grévin

Salt-marsh lamb, pré-salé

Not every lamb can claim it. Pré-salé lamb answers a strict specification: a defined geographic area, parents of grévine stock, every birth declared to the association, veterinary follow-up, and slaughter at sixty days at the earliest.

The decisive condition is the grazing: the ewes must graze at least 230 days a year on the salt meadows. Those meadows run through the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel, from the north to the south of the Cotentin, over more than 2,000 hectares.

Sixty-seven plant species share the levels of vegetation there: sea meadow-grass, cord-grass, sea purslane. It is that salt grazing that gives the meat its taste, with nothing added.

Pauillac lamb

Raised chiefly on its mother’s milk, for seventy-five days at most, for a carcass weight of 11 to 15 kg.

The meat is white to pale pink, with a flavour of its own: a lamb at the top of the range. It was on President Loubet’s menu in 1903, and the 1938 Larousse gastronomique called it the most perfect milk-fed lamb there is.

PGI

Pyrenean milk-fed lamb

From mid-June to September the ewes, of hardy local breeds (Manech black-face, Manech red-face, Basco-béarnaise), go up to the high Pyrenean pastures and the rich grazing there.

The milk-fed lamb is born down in the valleys, between November and May. Raised on a single farm, for forty-five days at most, it feeds on nothing but its mother's milk, at the udder.

That strictly milk diet gives meat that is pale, tender, soft and fragrant.