Skip to main content
Main

Roast Lamb

A lamb chop roasted with pepper, flour, and sea salt, served with a simple gravy and garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Roast Lamb

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the lamb

  1. Dust the lamb chop with pepper and dredge it with flour.

  2. Brown the chop on all sides in a hot skillet or broil it over a clear fire for 5 to 8 minutes.

  3. Place a meat rack in a drip pan and lay the meat on it.

Roast

  1. Roast in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for 30 to 50 minutes.

  2. After 30 minutes, check doneness by cutting a small gash in the center.

  3. If needed, return to the oven.

  4. Dust the roast with coarse sea salt.

  5. Place the roast on a warmed platter.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Mix 1 tablespoon of flour with 2 tablespoons of cold water and stir the mixture into the pan gravy.

  2. Add ½ cup of boiling water to the pan gravy and stir well.

  3. Boil for a few minutes.

  4. Season with salt.

  5. Serve the gravy in a gravy boat.

  6. Pour the gravy over the meat.

  7. Garnish the roast with parsley.

  8. Serve immediately.

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. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lamb + parsleytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,322 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb chop
Provides the rich meat that is cooked through and served as the main dish.
Flour
Coats the chop so it browns, and thickens the pan gravy into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Checking doneness before serving. Lamb cooked too long dries out, while undercooked meat is unsafe. Checking the centre after 30 minutes lets the cook judge doneness before the meat overcooks.

Swap the capers

The recipe marks capers as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, pepper, flour, parsley, butter):

  1. Thymefits about as well
  2. Marjoramfits about as well
  3. Capersthe original
  4. Turmericfits about as well

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

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes