Skip to main content
Main

Leg of Lamb, with the Loin Fried, Round It

A lamb leg boiled and served with fried loin steaks, topped with gravy, spinach, parsley, lemon, and gooseberry sauce or stewed spinach with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Leg of Lamb, with the Loin Fried, Round It

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the lamb

  1. Boil the leg of lamb in a cloth until tender.

  2. Cut the loin into steaks, beat them, and fry until golden brown.

  3. Stew the fried steaks in strong gravy for a few minutes.

Plate and serve

  1. Place the boiled leg on a serving dish and arrange the steaks around it.

  2. Pour the gravy over the leg and steaks.

  3. Garnish each steak with spinach and crisped parsley.

  4. Serve with lemon and either gooseberry sauce or stewed spinach with melted butter.

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. Spinach + gooseberrytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Spinach + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Spinach + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Parsley + gooseberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of lamb
Boiling in a cloth cooks the meat gently and keeps it moist while it becomes tender.
Loin of lamb
Frying the beaten steaks browns the surface, adding savoury flavour and a contrasting crisp texture.
Strong gravy
Stewing the steaks in gravy adds moisture and rich, savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Frying the loin steaks until golden brown. Browning relies on high surface heat and dry meat; overcrowding or too little heat makes the steaks steam and turn grey, losing flavour and crispness.

Swap the gooseberry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, spinach, parsley, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Gooseberrythe original
  4. Orangefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, spinach, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesSpinach SoupSpinach Soup50 recipesCream of SpinachCream of Spinach29 recipesCreamed Spinach SoupCreamed Spinach Soup19 recipes