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Stewed Loin of Lamb

A lamb loin stewed in butter and served with brown gravy, mint sauce, lettuce, radishes, and spring onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and radish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Stewed Loin of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Secure the flap of the lamb with a skewer.

Make the stew

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and add the lamb.

  2. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.

  3. Turn the lamb and simmer for an additional 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Lift the meat out and pour hot brown gravy over it.

  2. Serve with mint sauce, lettuce, radishes, and spring onions.

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. Lettuce + radishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Lettuce + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

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

  3. Mint + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together569 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Radish + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together323 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetal (cream, earthy).

  5. Lamb + minttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together772 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 loin
Main protein that becomes tender during long, gentle simmering.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping flavour carry through the cooking liquid.
Brown gravy
Adds moisture and savoury browned flavour to the meat when poured over it.

The step that matters

Keep the simmer gentle and covered. Lamb loin needs long, low, moist heat so its connective tissue softens into gelatin. A rolling boil toughens the meat and dries out its surface, so keep the liquid at a quiet simmer.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, butter, sauce, lettuce, radish, onion):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, butter, sauce, lettuce, radish, onion. 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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