Name: To Roast a Leg of Lamb
Ingredients: 1 leg of lamb; mint sauce; 1 tablespoon lemon juice; 1 egg yolk; bread crumbs; salt; pepper

Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

To Roast a Leg of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
Place the leg of lamb in a roasting pan.
Baste the lamb profusely with its juices during cooking.
Roast for 1.5 hours.
Before serving, mix the egg yolk with the gravy and baste the lamb.
Sprinkle with bread crumbs and allow to brown.
Squeeze lemon juice over the meat and serve with mint sauce.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Mint + lemontop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,998 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Mint + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,372 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Lamb + peppertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,165 recipes

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

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, sauce, lemon, egg, bread, pepper):

Parsleyfits better
Marjoramfits better
Tarragonfits better
Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, sauce, lemon, egg, bread, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.