Skip to main content
Main

Lamb Steaks

Lamb steaks served with a herb gravy and topped with fried breadcrumbs and parsley.

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

Lamb Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lamb

  1. Season the lamb steaks with coarse sea salt, pepper, and mace.

  2. Fry the lamb steaks in butter until browned.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pan, fry shredded parsley, thyme, and shallots in butter until half done.

  2. Add gravy, lemon juice, and flour to the herb mixture, and simmer gently for five minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the lamb steaks immediately, topped with fried bread crumbs and crimped parsley.

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. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  5. Thyme + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lamb steaks
Provide the main meat, which browns in butter to develop savoury flavour.
Butter
Carries heat for frying and adds richness and browning to the lamb and herbs.
Shallots
Add a mild, sweet onion-like flavour to the herb sauce base.
Gravy
Supplies the liquid and savoury body of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the gravy mixture as it simmers, giving the sauce body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and herbs.

The step that matters

Simmer the sauce gently. Flour needs sustained gentle heat to cook out its raw taste and fully thicken the gravy. Boiling hard can cause lumps or break the sauce, and a short simmer may leave it floury.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, butter, pepper, parsley, thyme, shallot, lemon):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, butter, pepper, parsley, thyme, shallot, lemon. 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.

More lamb steaks recipes

White 5Brown 3Fried 3with Mashed Potatoes 3 See all 8 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes