Name: Shoulder of Lamb and Sorrel Sauce
Ingredients: 1 shoulder of lamb; forcemeat; sorrel; coarse sea salt; black pepper or cayenne

Why it works: Sorrel and pepper work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 419 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Shoulder of Lamb and Sorrel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Remove the blade-bone from the shoulder of lamb and fill the cavity with forcemeat. Sew it up.
Place the lamb in a braise and simmer slowly on the stove until cooked through.
Glaze the lamb and serve it with sorrel 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.

Sorrel + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together419 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lamb + peppertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,165 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Lamb + sorreltop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together35 recipes

Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).