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Lamb Stewed with Green Peas

A lamb stew simmered with green peas, salt, flour, butter, and optional cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lamb Stewed with Green Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the lamb pieces in a pot and cover with water.

  2. Cover the pot and simmer for 20 minutes. Skim off any scum that forms on the surface.

Add peas and thicken

  1. Add the salt and shelled peas, cover, and simmer for 30 minutes.

  2. Mix the flour with butter to form a paste. Stir the paste into the stew.

  3. Let it simmer for an additional 10 minutes.

  4. For a richer flavor, mix the flour with cream before adding to the stew.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lamb + peastop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together650 recipes

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

  4. Peas + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Lamb + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Long simmering breaks down connective tissue, leaving the meat tender and the broth richer.
Shelled peas
Add sweetness, bright color and a soft, tender texture to the stew.
Flour
Starch swells in the hot liquid and thickens the stew into a light gravy.
Butter
Adds fat that coats the flour and gives the stew a rounder, silkier mouthfeel.
Cream
Adds fat and richness to the gravy when used for the optional richer flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour paste into the stew. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid unmixed. Blending it with butter first and stirring it in well lets the starch disperse and thicken evenly as the stew simmers.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, flour, butter, cream):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, flour, butter, cream. 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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