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Lamb Stew

A stew of lamb shoulder, carrots, pepper, sea salt, sugar, flour, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Lamb Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Cover lamb pieces with cold water and boil for about 1 hour.

  2. Add carrots, season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and sugar, and boil until carrots are tender.

  3. Thicken the stew with flour browned in butter.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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 + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lamb + carrottop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together724 recipes

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 shoulder
Provides the rich, meaty body and flavor that forms the base of the stew.
Young carrots
Add sweetness and tender texture to the stew as they cook.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so the stew becomes body-rich rather than watery.
Butter
Carries the flour as it browns, adding nutty aroma to the thickener.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in butter. Flour must be cooked until lightly browned to remove raw starch taste and develop aroma. Adding it raw, or stirring it in without first cooking it into the butter, can leave lumps and a pasty flavor.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Carrotthe original

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