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Larks, a LA Minute

Larks à la Minute is a quick dish of larks sautéed with butter, Espagnole sauce, mushrooms, glaze, and lemon juice.

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

Cook the larks

  1. In a deep skillet, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Season the larks with salt and pepper, then fry until browned and nearly cooked through.

  3. 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 on a platter 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 + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

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

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Larks
Provide the main protein, which browns on the outside while staying tender inside.
Espagnole sauce
Forms the body of the sauce, adding richness and savoury depth.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and a soft, meaty texture to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the larks and richness to the finished sauce.
Glaze
Adds concentrated savoury flavour and gloss to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances its fat.

The step that matters

Frying the larks until just nearly cooked through. Small birds cook quickly, so overcooking dries the meat. Stopping at nearly done lets residual heat finish cooking while the larks simmer briefly in the sauce, keeping them moist.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, sauce, mushroom):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Avocadofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sauce, mushroom. 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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