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Sauce

Mint Sauce

A sauce made from lamb drippings, tomato ketchup, and chopped mint.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and mint work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 828 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Mint Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pour the drippings from the roast lamb into a bowl.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of tomato ketchup.

  3. Stir in the chopped fresh mint.

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. Tomato + minttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together828 recipes

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

  2. Lamb + tomatotop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together979 recipes

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

  3. Lamb + minttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together772 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + ketchuptop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together754 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Lamb + ketchuptop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (soapy, waxy).

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

What each ingredient does

Drippings from roast lamb
Adds fat and savory, meaty richness that carries the lamb flavor into the sauce.
Tomato ketchup
Adds sweetness and tang, rounding out the savory drippings.
Fresh green mint
Adds bright, herbal aroma that cuts through the richness of the fat.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, tomato, ketchup):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, tomato, ketchup. 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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