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Larks, a LA Minute

A quick sautéed lark dish with Espagnole sauce, mushrooms, glaze, butter, lemon, and fried croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Larks, a LA Minute

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the larks

  1. Cut off the legs and remove the gizzards from the larks.

Cook

  1. In a deep skillet, melt the butter and add the larks. Season with salt and pepper, and fry over medium heat until browned and nearly cooked.

  2. Pour off excess grease, then add the Espagnole sauce, mushrooms, glaze, butter, and lemon juice. Toss everything together until well mixed.

Serve

  1. Serve the larks 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
Provide the meat that is browned and then served in the sauce.
Espagnole sauce
Forms the rich brown sauce that coats the larks and mushrooms.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and body to the sauce.
Butter
Carries the frying of the larks and adds richness to the finished sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the larks until browned and nearly cooked. Browning over medium heat builds flavour through the Maillard reaction, while stopping at nearly cooked leaves the birds from drying out when they finish in the sauce.

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.

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