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Lamb Pot-pie

A lamb stew with dumplings, simmered in a thick gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lamb Pot-pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Add lamb, onion, carrot, and turnip to nearly boiling water.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt to taste.

  3. Thicken the gravy with 1 tablespoon of flour.

Add the dumplings and serve

  1. Mix 1 cup flour, baking powder, milk, and a pinch of salt to make dumpling dough.

  2. Take a piece of the dumpling dough, roll lightly, and flatten into a round cake.

  3. Place the dumplings on top of the stew and cook for 10 minutes before serving.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Provides the meat and savory flavor that forms the body of the stew.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the meat and vegetables.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dumpling dough so the dumplings rise and turn light.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness to the dumpling dough, helping it hold together.

The step that matters

Place the dumplings on top of the stew and cook for 10 minutes before serving.. Dumplings need to cook through in gently simmering liquid; if the stew is boiling hard or too cool, they can turn gummy or raw in the centre. Keeping the lid on traps steam so they set and rise evenly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, carrot, turnip, 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.

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