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Lamb Stewed with Peas

A lamb stew cooked with peas, flour, butter, and spices, served with boiled new potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and potato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 235 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Lamb Stewed with Peas

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lamb

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

  2. Cover the stewpan and simmer for 15-20 minutes.

  3. Skim off any scum that forms on the surface.

Make the stew

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

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour with the butter until smooth.

  3. Stir the flour-butter mixture into the stew along with the pepper.

  4. Let it simmer together for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled new potatoes.

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. Wheat + potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together235 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Peas + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,016 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Pepper + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  4. Lamb + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together520 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Peas
Add sweetness and a fresh, green flavour to the stew.
Wheat flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so the stew becomes body-rich rather than watery.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the thickened stew.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour-butter mixture. Adding flour directly to hot liquid can form lumps, because starch clumps before it disperses. Mixing it smooth with the butter first and stirring it in gradually lets the starch hydrate evenly and thicken the stew without lumps.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, peas, wheat, flour, butter, pepper, potato):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

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