Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Breast of Lamb

A lamb breast stew cooked with onions, celery, parsley, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Stewed Breast of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. Add the onions, celery, and parsley.

Stew and finish

  1. Stew until the lamb is tender, about 1.5 hours.

  2. Thicken the stew with butter and flour.

  3. Season with salt and pepper, then serve.

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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb breast
Provides the rich meat that becomes tender during long, gentle stewing.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic flavor that deepen as the stew simmers.
Butter and flour
Together form a roux that thickens the stewing liquid into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Stewing until tender. Lamb breast is rich in connective tissue that needs long, low, moist cooking to break down. Stopping too early leaves the meat tough and chewy, so it should be tested for tenderness rather than served on time alone.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, celery, parsley, butter, flour, pepper. 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.

More stewed lamb breast recipes

with Mushrooms 4 See all 9 →

You might also like

Cream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipesCelery Cream SoupCelery Cream Soup15 recipes