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Minced Lamb

A sauce of butter, onion, flour, broth, spices, and cold cooked lamb, served with parsley and potato croquettes or croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,062 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Minced Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the chopped onion and cook for 5 minutes without browning.

  3. Stir in the flour and cook for 2 minutes.

  4. Add the white broth and season with salt, white pepper, nutmeg, and the bouquet of herbs.

  5. Cook for 6 minutes, then remove the bouquet.

Add the lamb and serve

  1. Stir in the chopped cold cooked lamb and cook for 10 minutes.

  2. Serve on a warm dish, sprinkle with parsley, and garnish with potato croquettes or croutons.

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. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  2. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and carries flavour while the onion softens.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth sauce that holds the lamb.
White broth
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the lamb is cooked in.
Cold cooked lamb
Provides the main meat, which is gently heated through in the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the onion without browning. Browned onion turns bitter and darkens the white sauce, so it should soften gently over moderate heat before the flour goes in.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, flour, nutmeg, lamb, parsley, potato):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, flour, nutmeg, lamb, parsley, potato. 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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