Skip to main content
Main

Roast Spare Rib

Roast spare rib with butter, bread crumbs, sage, pepper, sea salt, onion, and a lemon‑flavored gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sage and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 887 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Roast Spare Rib

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.

Roast

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Baste the spare rib with butter every few minutes.

  3. Baste the spare rib with its own gravy every few minutes.

  4. Sprinkle the rib with bread crumbs, sage, pepper, sea salt, and minced onion before removing from the oven.

  5. Cook for an additional 5 minutes, basting once more with butter.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Skim the gravy, add hot water, thicken with brown flour, and squeeze in lemon juice.

  2. Strain the gravy and pour it over the meat.

  3. Serve with tomato ketchup on the side or mixed into the gravy.

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. Sage + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds moisture and richness, and helps the rib brown as it bastes.
Fine bread crumbs
Form a crisp, savoury crust on the surface of the rib.
Brown flour
Starch thickens the gravy so it coats the meat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy.
Onion
Adds savoury aroma and mild sweetness as it cooks.

The step that matters

Thickening the gravy with brown flour. Flour clumps if it is not whisked evenly into the hot liquid. Its starch swells with heat, so the gravy thickens smoothly only when the flour is fully mixed in.

Swap the tomato

The recipe marks tomato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, bread, sage, pepper, onion, flour, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, sage, pepper, onion, flour, lemon. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipes