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To Collar Lamb

A roasted lamb collar coated with egg yolk, breadcrumbs, and parsley, served with gravy and lemon or pickles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Collar Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the lamb

  1. Bone the fore quarter of lamb and beat it flat.

  2. Rub the meat with the egg yolk and season with salt, white pepper, nutmeg, and mace.

  3. Sprinkle grated bread and minced parsley over the meat.

  4. Add the minced yolks and whites of the hard boiled eggs, and top with more minced parsley.

  5. Roll the meat tightly and secure it with a skewer and sewing.

Roast and serve

  1. Rub the collar with the beaten egg and coat it with breadcrumbs and parsley.

  2. Roast in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 1.5 hours.

  3. Make gravy from the bones and serve the meat with the gravy, garnished with lemon slices or pickles.

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

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

  2. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  5. White pepper + macetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Fore quarter of lamb
Provides the main meat that is rolled around the filling and becomes tender when roasted.
Hard boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a creamy texture to the stuffing.
Hard boiled egg whites
Add body and mild texture to the stuffing.
Grated bread
Absorbs juices and keeps the stuffing moist and binds it inside the roll.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, browned crust on the outside of the rolled meat.
Egg
Helps the breadcrumb coating adhere and brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Rolling the meat tightly. If the roll is loose, the filling can fall out and the meat cooks unevenly. Tight rolling and firm skewering keep the stuffing in place and the roast a compact shape.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, egg, nutmeg, mace, bread, parsley, lemon):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, egg, nutmeg, mace, bread, parsley, 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.

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