More and more Americans are turning to the barbecue pit when it’s time for holiday gatherings. Some eschew the oven and cook a pork shoulder or turkey on a backyard smoker or grill. Others outsource the work and bring home takeout trays from a local barbecue restaurant. A whole smoked brisket or pork shoulder makes for an impressive centerpiece, but this year I have a different suggestion. How about barbecued lamb?
Bear with me. Lamb was once among the most popular barbecue meats. But after World War Two it all but disappeared from American pits. Over the past two decades, as aspiring backyard chefs have acquired ever-fancier offset smokers and pellet cookers, they’ve set their sights on mastering brisket, ribs and Boston butts. Lamb almost never makes it onto the menu. It should, though. Smoked lamb is currently enjoying a renaissance among inventive American pitmasters and barbecue fans really should give it a try.
At huge, outdoor barbecues in the 19th century, lambs and sheep were routinely roasted in hand-dug pits alongside whole hogs and sides of beef. Smoked lamb and mutton were staples in early barbecue restaurants, too, as meat-smoking went commercial in the early 20th century. (Lamb is simply meat from a sheep that’s less than a year old. Anything older is mutton.)
The Carolinas are uniformly pork territory today, but that wasn’t the case when entrepreneurs first started selling smoked meats at makeshift stands on holidays. On July 4 in the 1920s, vendors across South Carolina advertised barbecue for sale in local newspapers and almost all featured both pork and lamb. As stands evolved into restaurants, lamb and mutton were among the featured items at places like Frank’s Barbecue in Fort Worth, Texas, which in 1931 touted its “Choicest of Beef – Mutton – Spare Ribs.”
Despite their affection for the barbecued version, Americans have never been big sheep-eaters, especially compared with the United Kingdom and Australia. The annual US consumption of lamb and mutton slipped from an annual peak of 7.7 pounds per capita in 1912 to 6.6 pounds by the end of the 1930s. By comparison, the English ate 25 pounds per person and Australians 72 pounds in 1928, while New Zealanders consumed a whopping 82.
Americans became even more sheepish after World War Two, when consumption slumped to five pounds per person while that of beef rose to 69. A 1949 report observed that American meat prices were soaring because of demand, but lamb and mutton had “reached the vanishing point in many city markets.”
When choosing between sheep or cattle, ranchers increasingly opted for higher-profit beef. American flocks declined from more than 50 million sheep just after World War Two to 30 million by 1950. At the same time, chicken was booming as poultry farming transformed into a large-scale industrial operation. Between 1950 and 1965, chicken prices plummeted from 60 cents a pound to around 30 cents, and per-capita poultry consumption in the US doubled.
Once an expensive treat reserved for Sunday dinner, chicken had become one of the cheapest meats on the market. Little wonder that restaurateurs started to put the lamb out to pasture and replace it with barbecued chicken.
At the turn of the 21st century, lamb was all but gone from the American barbecue scene. You could find lamb ribs at a few old-school Texas spots such as Davila’s in Seguin, which has served them since it opened in 1959. Johnny Harris Barbecue in Savannah, Georgia, had smoked leg of lamb on the menu right up until it closed in 2016.
The only place where barbecuing sheep never fell out of favor was Kentucky – or, more specifically, the handful of counties in western Kentucky surrounding Owensboro, the barbecued mutton capital of the world. You can still have your fill of chopped or sliced mutton from the all-you-can-eat buffet at Owensboro’s famed Moonlite Bar-B-Q Inn. Across town at Old Hickory Bar-B-Que, you can order mutton ribs and sliced mutton fresh off the pit and sauce it yourself with dark, tangy “dip.”
Now, though, lamb is making a return. When I made a barbecue tour through central Texas this summer, my favorite bites weren’t taken from the “Texas trinity” of smoked brisket, pork ribs and beef sausage links. They were all lamb.
At Barbs-B-Q in Lockhart, I was wowed by pitmaster Chuck Charnichart’s “lamb chopis” – thyme- and rosemary-rubbed racks smoked medium rare and sliced to order into savory individual chops. At Micklethwait Barbecue in Austin, I discovered beguiling spiced lamb sausages that, unlike Texas’s juice-squirting beef links, are fairly dry in texture but sing with rich lamb flavor.
Sheep takes center stage at Austin’s KG BBQ in the form of pulled lamb shoulder accented with sumac and cinnamon and “lamb bacon ribs” – bone-in lamb belly chopped into chunks and served with spicy mint chimichurri. At Burnt Bean Co. in Seguin, pitmaster Ernest Servantes frequently puts lamb on his specials board, including Moroccan-spiced lamb ribs layered with lemony chermoula sauce.
Texas cooks are leading the lamb revival, but the meat is popping up in other places, too. The Washington, DC, branch of 2fifty BBQ serves pulled lamb from smoked bone-in shoulder with fresh blue corn tortillas. In nearby Bethesda, Maryland, Silver and Sons, a self-described Jewish-Mediterranean barbecue joint, makes sandwiches with pulled lamb shoulder on soft challah rolls.
I’ll concede that lamb has a sharper, earthier bite than beef or pork, but that’s a feature, not a bug. Unlike chicken and turkey, its taste hasn’t been washed out by decades of industrial breeding, which has left us with highly engineered birds with unnaturally plump breasts and the flavor of cotton. As with good whiskey and aged cheese, an appreciation for lamb’s strong flavor can take time to acquire, but it’s the natural match for the smoke of a barbecue pit.
If you can’t find lamb at a nearby barbecue restaurant, you can always smoke your own. It won’t take all day, either, unlike a brisket or pork shoulder. A five-pound lamb shoulder, slow-smoked at 275°F, will be tender enough to pull after five or six hours. It’s even faster if you splurge for a few racks of lamb, which can be done in less than 45 minutes. (Use an instant-read thermometer and take them to 135 degrees internal temperature for a perfect medium rare.)
When you deliver a platter of herb-rubbed, eight-bone racks of lamb to the holiday table, you’re guaranteed to impress your guests. And if anyone complains that they don’t like the flavor, tell them ham and smoked turkey can be found over at the kids’ table.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
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