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Ragoût of Lamb’s Liver

A savory ragout of lamb liver simmered in a butter‑onion sauce with stock, lemon, and sherry, garnished with hard‑boiled eggs and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Ragoût of Lamb’s Liver

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liver

  1. Wash the liver.

  2. Boil the liver in salted water until tender.

  3. Drain the liver.

  4. Cut the liver into thin slices.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Fry the onion until browned.

  3. Stir in the flour and mix well with the butter.

  4. Gradually add the stock.

  5. Season with salt, pepper, and spices.

  6. Boil the sauce for five minutes.

  7. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve.

  8. Return the sauce to the saucepan.

  9. Add lemon juice.

  10. Add sherry.

Finish and serve

  1. Heat the liver in the sauce.

  2. Serve on a hot dish.

  3. Garnish with slices of hard-boiled eggs and lemon.

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Lamb + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,165 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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 liver
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender when boiled and sliced.
Butter
Carries the onion's flavour and enriches the sauce with fat for a smooth texture.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Stock
Provides the liquid base of the sauce.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aroma to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter and adding stock gradually. Cooking flour in fat before adding liquid, and adding the stock slowly, lets starch granules disperse evenly. Dumping liquid in at once can leave lumps that are hard to smooth out.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, liver, butter, onion, flour, pepper, sherry):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Limefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, liver, butter, onion, flour, pepper, sherry. 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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