Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Lamb with Green Pease

A lamb stew cooked with green peas, flour, and milk for a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lamb and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,165 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Lamb with Green Pease

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the lamb

  1. Place the lamb in a stew pan and cover it with cold water.

  2. Remove any scum that forms, then add a little pepper and salt.

  3. Let the meat stew for 1½ to 2 hours.

  4. Add boiling water to create gravy.

Add the peas and thicken

  1. Stir in the shelled green peas and cook for about 20 minutes.

  2. Mix the flour with the milk and stir it into the stew.

  3. Cook for an additional 2 minutes.

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. Lamb + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Lamb + peastop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together650 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + peastop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Peas + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,309 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Provides the main protein and meaty flavor that the long stew softens and enriches.
Green peas
Add sweetness, color and a tender texture to the stew.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy as it is stirred in and heated.
Milk
Adds richness and body to the gravy, softening its flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and milk into the stew. Flour mixed directly into hot liquid can form lumps. Mixing it first with milk to a smooth paste helps it disperse evenly, and the starch thickens the gravy only when heated enough.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, pepper, flour, milk):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, pepper, flour, milk. 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.

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes