Skip to main content
Main

Larks, a LA Minute

Larks, à la Minute, is a quick sautéed lark dish served with mushroom sauce and fried croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Larks, a LA Minute

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the larks

  1. Cut off the legs and remove the gizzards from the larks using a small knife.

Cook

  1. In a deep skillet, melt the butter and add the larks. Season with salt and pepper.

  2. Fry the larks over medium-high heat until browned and nearly cooked through.

  3. Pour off excess grease, then add the Espagnole sauce, mushrooms, glaze, butter, and lemon juice.

  4. Toss everything over the heat until well mixed.

Serve

  1. Serve the larks on a platter with fried croutons around them, and pour the mushroom sauce over the top.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Mushroom + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 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

Larks
The main protein, which browns in the fat and stays tender when cooked just until nearly done.
Butter
Fat for frying that browns the larks and carries flavour into the sauce.
Espagnole sauce
Brown sauce base that gives the dish its body and savoury depth.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and moisture to the sauce as they cook.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the larks until just nearly cooked through. Small birds dry out quickly. Stopping at nearly done lets residual heat finish them while they stay juicy, and the sauce is tossed in afterward to finish cooking gently.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, sauce, mushroom, bread):

  1. Plumfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Avocadofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sauce, mushroom, bread. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes