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To Dress Lamb’s Feet

A stew of lamb's feet cooked in white stock, thickened with flour and butter, finished with cream and lemon, served with toasted bread.

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

To Dress Lamb’s Feet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the feet

  1. Clean and wash the lamb's feet thoroughly, then blanch them.

Make the stew

  1. Stew the feet in white stock with ham, onion, parsley, thyme, mace, white pepper, and mushrooms until tender.

  2. Strain the sauce, thicken it with flour and butter, and add cream.

  3. Boil the sauce for 15 minutes, then add the feet and lemon juice.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish with snippets of thin toasted bread cut into triangles.

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. Thyme + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. Mace + white peppertop 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

Lamb's feet
Provide the main body and gelatinous texture once stewed until tender.
Flour
Thickens the sauce together with butter so it coats the feet.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and combines with flour to form a thickening roux.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the finished sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling the thickened sauce before adding the feet. Boiling the cream sauce for 15 minutes reduces and thickens it while the cream is stable; adding the feet and lemon juice afterwards keeps the lemon from curdling the cream during prolonged heat.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, ham, onion, parsley, thyme, mace, mushroom):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, ham, onion, parsley, thyme, mace, 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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