Lamb Stew with Pearl Onions

Saturday April 7
We were feeling paschal, though not enough to dye eggs or mark our doorpost with blood (multiple religions have twisted our minds). A lamb stew is a nice alternative. This one is a compromise between the Greek one given in Paula Wolfert's Slow Mediterranean Kitchen and the Turkish one (with added chestnuts) in Claudia Roden's Arabesque. Different countries, same cuisine. The two books are very different, too: Wolfert's recipe takes two days and dirties every dish in the house, while Roden's is more practical but lacks a few grace notes.
Here's what we ended up with.
Ingredients: a pound and a half of cubed-up lamb, a pound of pearl onions, an additional medium-sized onion, 2 cloves garlic, a pound can of diced (or similar) tomatoes, 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, 1/4 tsp. allspice, 1/2 tsp. sugar, 1 bay leaf, 1 TBSP. red wine vinegar.
To skin the pearl onions, blanch them BRIEFLY (maybe a minute - both recipes do it way too long) in boiling water. Trim and skin them until they're nice and pearly.
If you can do two things at once, at the same time heat some oil in your dutch oven and brown the chopped onion, then the garlic. Scrape them into a dishwasher-safe dish, add more oil, and brown the peeled pearl onions; put them in a different dish. Then brown the lamb in batches so the pieces are separate and cook evenly. You can add them to the chopped-onion dish.
Return the lamb, chopped onion, and garlic to the dutch oven, and throw in the can of tomatoes and all the seasonings except the vinegar. Cover, and let it cook 1 1/4 hours. At the end of that time, add the pearl onions and cook down for a half hour more, open or closed depending on how thick the sauce is and how thick you want it. At the end, add the vinegar, and adjust for salt and pepper.
Mediterranean lamby goodness.