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Roast Quarter of Lamb

Roast Quarter of Lamb is a seasoned lamb joint roasted with bacon, clarified butter, breadcrumbs, and optional lemon, served with mint sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Quarter of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Trim the joint and skewer the bacon slices securely to the outer side.

  2. Brush the inner part with clarified butter.

  3. Cover the inner part with bread crumbs seasoned with pepper, salt, and parsley.

Roast

  1. Put the lamb in a 400°F (200°C) oven.

  2. When nearly done, remove the bacon.

  3. Baste the meat with the beaten egg yolk mixed with gravy.

  4. Sprinkle more bread crumbs over the lamb.

  5. Let the lamb brown nicely.

Serve

  1. Squeeze lemon juice over the lamb before serving with mint sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

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.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Lemon + minttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,998 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Parsley + minttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,198 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking through in the oven as the roast.
Bacon
Skewered to the outside, it bastes the lean meat with its fat as it cooks.
Clarified butter
Adds fat that helps the crumb coating brown evenly and richly.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned crust over the meat when baked.
Beaten egg yolk
Binds with gravy in the baste, helping the crust set and brown.

The step that matters

Remove the bacon when nearly done. Leaving the bacon on too long can over-render its fat and burn or dry the surface, while removing it too early leaves the lean meat under-protected. Timing it near the end lets the crumb crust brown without scorching.

“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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