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Lamb’s Head D LA Loyal

A lamb head served with a liver and heart mince, seasoned with pepper, sea salt, lemon, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Lamb’s Head D LA Loyal

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

  1. Boil the liver and heart until tender, then remove the liver.

  2. Mince the liver and set aside.

Make the mince

  1. Heat enough coulis and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Squeeze in the juice of half a lemon and add a little sugar to taste.

  3. Stir in the minced liver and keep warm on a slow stove without boiling.

Serve

  1. Serve the mince on a dish with the head, tongue, and heart on 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. Lamb + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,165 recipes

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

  3. Lamb + livertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together145 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Liver + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,375 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb's liver
Provides the rich, savoury body of the mince once minced and warmed through.
Coulis
Forms the liquid base of the mince, carrying the seasoning and the minced liver.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich flavour of the liver and sauce.

The step that matters

Keep the mince warm without boiling. Boiling a mixture containing minced liver can toughen the proteins and make the texture grainy, so it should stay warm over gentle heat.

“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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