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Lamb Stew

A hearty stew of lamb, potatoes, carrots, turnips, onions, green pepper, thickened with milk and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lamb

  1. Cut the lamb into 1-inch pieces.

  2. Cover the lamb with 4 quarts of cold water and simmer until the meat is tender.

Add the vegetables

  1. Slice the potatoes about ½ inch thick and add them to the stew.

  2. Cook the carrots, onions, turnips, and green pepper separately.

  3. Add the cooked vegetables to the stew about 20 minutes before it is done.

Thicken and season

  1. Mix the flour with the milk for thickening.

  2. Add the flour‑milk mixture to the stew 10 minutes before removing the stew from heat.

  3. Season to taste.

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. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Lamb shoulder
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow simmering in water.
Potatoes
Their starch softens during cooking and helps body the broth as they break down.
Flour
Thickens the stew liquid when mixed with milk and heated.
Milk
Adds richness and creaminess to the thickened stew liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the flour‑milk mixture. Flour mixed with milk must be stirred smoothly before it goes in, then cooked through. Adding it lumpy or too late leaves raw floury taste and uneven thickness, so timing it 10 minutes before the end matters.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, potato, carrot, turnip, pepper, milk, flour. 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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