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Boast Lamb

Roast lamb served with a mint, brown sugar, and vinegar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lamb and mint work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 772 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boast Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Roast the lamb

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Roast the fore quarter of lamb for about 1.5 hours, basting frequently.

Make the gravy and mint sauce

  1. For the gravy, collect the drippings from the roaster, add a little water, coarse sea salt, and flour, then bring to a boil.

  2. For the mint sauce, finely chop the mint, then mix with brown sugar and vinegar.

Serve

  1. Serve the mint sauce in a sauceboat alongside the roast lamb.

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

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

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Mint + vinegartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lamb + flourtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Fore quarter of lamb
Provides the meat that is roasted and served as the main dish.
Flour
Thickens the drippings into a gravy as it heats.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar in the sauce.
Sharp vinegar
Adds acidity that cuts through the richness of the lamb and sweetness of the sugar.
Fresh mint
Adds a fresh, aromatic herb flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Bring the gravy to a boil. Flour only thickens properly when it is heated in liquid long enough for its starch to swell. Boiling gelatinises the starch, so the gravy thickens; if it stays too cool, it will taste raw and stay thin.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, flour, sugar, vinegar. 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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