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Lamb Stewed with Onions

A lamb stew cooked slowly with onions, pepper, salt, water, and thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Lamb Stewed with Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the onions.

  2. In a stew pan, combine the sliced onions and lamb chops, cutting off the ends of the chops and pounding them.

  3. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Stew and thicken

  1. Add enough water to cover the ingredients and let them stew slowly until tender.

  2. To thicken the gravy, add a piece of butter rolled in flour.

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Lamb + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + lambtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,407 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

Butter and flour 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 chops
Provide the main protein, which becomes tender through slow stewing in liquid.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma as they soften and release their flavour into the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour in the finished gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks in the liquid, giving it body.

The step that matters

Stewing until tender. Stewing slowly in enough liquid breaks down the tough connective tissue in lamb, so the meat softens. Cooking too fast or too briefly leaves it chewy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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