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Lamb Chops with Bacon

A dish of lamb chops seasoned with coarse sea salt, fried with bacon and served with green peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lamb and peas work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 650 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lamb Chops with Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat 1 tablespoon of butter in a hot frying pan.

  2. Add thin slices of bacon and fry for 2 minutes on each side.

  3. Remove bacon and keep warm.

  4. Season the lamb chops with coarse sea salt and fry until browned in the same pan.

  5. Serve the lamb chops on a dish with the bacon and green peas in the middle.

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

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

  2. Butter + peastop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 recipes

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

  3. Butter + lambtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb chops
Provide the main meat, which browns in the pan to develop savoury flavour.
Bacon
Renders fat into the pan and adds smoky, salty flavour to the dish.
Butter
Conducts heat in the pan and adds richness and browning to the frying.

The step that matters

Frying the lamb chops until browned. The chops need a hot pan and enough time to brown. Browning, the Maillard reaction, creates savoury flavour, and a crowded or cool pan will steam the meat instead.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Beansfits about as well
  3. Sesamefits about as well
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lamb. 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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