"Hanging is a prerequisite for eating mutton, as far as I'm concerned," he told us. He dry-ages lamb (and mutton, when he can get it) for as long as three weeks, either in a walk-in cooler or outdoors if the weather is cold enough. Doing so breaks down tough connective tissues, tenderizing the meat and gentling its pumped-up flavor.

Instead of mutton, he served us the next best thing, a stout shoulder of lamb with its cap of ivory fat intact. He had started it off in the oven of his big Vulcan range at 500 degrees for 25 minutes, to caramelize it, then turned the heat down to 200 degrees. It roasted slowly, ever so slowly, for the entire morning, emerging juicy and tender and altogether irresistible, the skin cracker-crisp, the meat still slightly pink.

"You let the fat ooze through it," Mr. Nicoll said as we nibbled on smoked salmon and his own slab bacon in the kitchen, "but once that has happened, you take it out. Right away. Leave it in, and the meat will turn tough and dry."

Mr. Nicoll's wife, Rachel, is English, as was Mr. Nicoll's father. Their house, with uncarpeted heart-pine floors, a half-dozen dogs scurrying underfoot and logs blazing in the fireplaces in the kitchen and the dining room, has such a feel of Yorkshire about it that you half expect James Herriot to come bounding through the door at any moment.

Helped along by an excellent South Australian shiraz, we made short work of the lamb and its festive accomplices -- spinach, red cabbage and Yorkshire puddings with veal sweetbreads. By the time I had polished off a second helping proffered by our genially patrician host, I had almost convinced myself that I was eating mutton. Mmm. The flavor was certainly robust enough, the texture was right, but putting wishful thinking aside I realized that our lamb was a bit too far removed from the barnyard to measure up to the mutton of Prince Charles's culinary dreams.

TO tell the truth, Americans don't eat much lamb, let alone mutton. For all the lamb chops consumed in WASP-y households, all the legs of lamb eaten on Easter and all the lamb shanks that seem as common these days on restaurant menus as strip steaks, we consume on average only slightly more than a pound a year for each adult, compared with 50 pounds of pork and 65 pounds of beef. New Zealanders eat 40 pounds of lamb apiece every year and Greeks eat 31.

It wasn't always so, and there was in fact a time when mutton was common on American tables. The 1918 edition of Fannie Farmer's immensely influential cookbook, for example, gave instructions for preparing leg, saddle, chops and curry of mutton, although it also noted that "many object to the strong flavor of mutton."