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Saute of Lambs' Hearts— Toulousaine

Sauté of lamb hearts with forcemeat balls and olives in brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and olive are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,665 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Saute of Lambs' Hearts— Toulousaine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the lambs' hearts into pieces.

  2. Make a forcemeat similar to that for stuffed onions, adding a little garlic.

  3. Form small balls of the forcemeat, about the size of walnuts, and roll them in flour.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat a pan with roast meat fat and cook the balls until they are light brown.

  2. Serve two slices or half a heart with the sauté gravy and arrange the baked forcemeat balls around it.

  3. Add two or three heated olives in brown sauce on the side.

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. Garlic + olivetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,665 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Lamb + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Lamb + olivetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,586 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Lamb + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together469 recipes

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

  5. Flour + garlictop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,149 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

Lambs' hearts
Provide the main meat, which is sliced and served as the centrepiece of the dish.
Flour
Coats the forcemeat balls so they brown well and develop a light, crisp surface.
Roast meat fat
Conducts heat in the pan and adds richness and browning to the forcemeat balls.
Garlic
Adds aroma and savoury flavour to the forcemeat.
Olives
Add a briny, slightly acidic note alongside the rich brown sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the forcemeat balls. Flour-coated balls need enough fat heated to a steady level so the surface browns through the Maillard reaction without burning before the centre is cooked. Too little heat leaves them pale and soggy; too much scorches the flour.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, flour, meat, olive, sauce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Garlicthe original
  3. Cuminfits about as well
  4. Turmericfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, flour, meat, olive, sauce. 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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