Why it works: Bread and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Lamb Chops
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Grate plenty of stale bread and season it with salt and pepper.
Dip each lamb chop into the beaten egg, then into the bread crumbs, repeating the process for better coating.
Heat hot lard in a skillet.
Cook and serve
Fry the coated lamb chops in the boiling lard until brown, then turn to cook the other side.
Serve with currant jelly or grape ketchup.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together22,662 recipes
Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
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Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together20,964 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together2,398 recipes
Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
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Egg + curranttop 26% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together8,734 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
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Pepper + curranttop 28% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together1,345 recipes
Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Stale bread
- Forms the crisp breaded coating that browns during frying.
- Egg
- Binds the bread crumbs to the lamb chops so the coating holds.
- Lamb chops (in the method)
- The main protein, cooked through by frying in the coating.
- Lard
- Fat for frying that browns the crumb coating and adds richness.
The step that matters
Frying the coated chops until brown. The lard must be hot enough to brown the crumb coating quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs fat and turns greasy before the chop cooks through.
Swap the currant
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, egg):
- Lemonfits better
- Figfits better
- Red currantfits better
- Currantthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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