Skip to main content
Preserve

Lamb's Stones

A veal gravy sauce thickened with flour, flavored with lemon, ketchup, lemon pickle, nutmeg, egg yolk, and cream, served with lamb's stones and forcemeat balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Lamb's Stones

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Thicken the veal gravy with flour in a saucepan.

  2. Add lemon slice, ketchup, lemon pickle, nutmeg, and egg yolk.

  3. Stir in thick cream and heat gently without boiling.

  4. Add lamb's stones and heat through.

  5. Serve in a dish with boiled forcemeat balls and garnish with lemon slices.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Ketchup + creamtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together279 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Nutmeg + creamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal gravy
Forms the savoury liquid base that the rest of the sauce is built on.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the lamb's stones instead of running off.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce gently when heated, adding richness and body.
Thick cream
Adds fat and smoothness, softening the sharpness of the lemon and pickle.

The step that matters

Heat gently without boiling. Once the egg yolk is in, boiling can curdle the sauce and make it grainy. Keeping the heat low lets it thicken smoothly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, flour, ketchup, nutmeg, egg, cream, lamb):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, flour, ketchup, nutmeg, egg, cream, lamb. 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

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes