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Breast of Lamb with Bechamel Sauce

Lamb breast braised with spices and served over bechamel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Breast of Lamb with Bechamel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lamb

  1. Bone the breast of lamb carefully, avoiding damage to the flesh.

  2. Roll the lamb tightly and secure it with a sturdy cord.

Simmer

  1. In a saucepan, place the butter, sliced pork, lamb bones, and some soup vegetables.

  2. Lay the lamb on top and squeeze the lemon juice over it.

  3. Cover with hot water, season with salt, mace, peppercorns, and cloves.

  4. Cover with a cloth and simmer gently for one hour or until tender.

Serve

  1. Prepare Bechamel sauce as directed.

  2. Place some sauce on a dish, remove the strings from the lamb, and lay it on the sauce.

  3. Pour more Bechamel over the lamb and 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. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Lamb + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together623 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Pork + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,515 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Breast of lamb
Forms the main meat; rolling and slow simmering make it tender and moist.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour through the braise.
Pork
Adds fat and savoury depth to the simmering liquid.
Lemon
Its acidity brightens the flavour of the rich lamb and butter.

The step that matters

Simmer gently under a cloth. Gentle heat keeps the meat tender and moist; a hard boil toughens the proteins and pulls out juices, so the lamb turns dry and stringy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Applefits better
  2. Quincefits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, pork, butter, mace, clove. 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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