Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Lamb’s Head

A dish of boiled lamb head, liver, and lights, coated in breadcrumbs and grilled, served with brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Stewed Lamb’s Head

Ingredients

Directions

Boil and coat

  1. Boil the lights for 1 hour, the head for 45 minutes, and the liver for 15 minutes.

  2. Brush the boiled head with the beaten egg yolk.

  3. Dredge the head with breadcrumbs mixed with parsley, lemon peel, thyme, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

Mince and grill

  1. Make a mince of the liver, lights, and heart, flavoring it with parsley, lemon peel, nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

  2. Grill the head until browned.

Serve

  1. Place the browned head on a hot dish.

  2. Surround the head with the mince and forcemeat balls.

  3. Pour thickened brown gravy over the dish and serve hot.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Lamb + parsleytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,322 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 head
Main protein; boiling softens it before it is coated and browned.
Lamb's liver
Adds rich, savory flavor to the mince.
Lamb's lights
Adds bulk and soft texture to the mince.
Egg yolk
Helps the breadcrumb coating stick and encourages browning.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating on the head.

The step that matters

Grill the head until browned. The boiled head is pale and the egg and crumb coating must brown without burning. Browning comes from Maillard reactions between proteins and sugars, which need strong, direct heat for a short time. Too little heat leaves it pale and soggy; too much dries the meat and scorches the crumbs.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes