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Roast Spare Rib

A roasted spare rib coated in flour, butter, breadcrumbs, sage, pepper, salt, and onion, served with a lemon‑flavored gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 887 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Roast Spare Rib

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Roast the rib

  1. Preheat the oven to 400 °F (200 °C).

  2. Cover the spare rib with greased paper and roast until half done.

  3. Remove the paper and dredge the rib with flour.

  4. Baste the rib with butter after a few minutes, then with its own gravy periodically.

  5. Before finishing, sprinkle the surface with bread crumbs, powdered sage, pepper, coarse sea salt, and minced onion.

  6. Cook for an additional 5 minutes and baste once more with butter.

Make the gravy

  1. Skim the gravy, add ½ cup hot water, thicken with browned flour, and squeeze in the juice of 1 lemon.

  2. Strain the gravy and pour it over the meat in the dish.

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. Sage + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Spare rib
Is the main cut of meat that is roasted and basted through the cooking.
Flour
Dredges the rib so its surface can brown and form a crust.
Butter
Adds fat for basting, promoting browning and a rich surface.
Browned flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the meat rather than running thin.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the gravy's flavour.

The step that matters

Cover with greased paper for the first half of roasting. Covering the rib keeps the surface from drying and scorching while the thick meat cooks through; removing the paper afterward lets the surface brown and crisp.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, bread, sage, pepper, lemon. 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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