Name: Breast of Lamb, Stewed with Mushrooms
Ingredients: 1 breast of lamb; ½ pint mushrooms; 1 teaspoon chopped parsley; 1 shallot or small onion, finely minced; coarse sea salt; black pepper; butter; stock; a few drops of lemon juice

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 ↓

Breast of Lamb, Stewed with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

Remove the bones from the lamb.
Melt a little butter in a saucepan.
Add the lamb and brown it evenly on all sides.
Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Stew

Add parsley, shallot or onion, and mushrooms.
Pour in enough stock to barely cover the meat.
Simmer gently for 1 hour.
Ten minutes before serving, add lemon juice to the gravy.

Serve

Serve the lamb on a hot dish with mushrooms and strained gravy.

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.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,737 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Mushroom + shallottop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb breast: Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender through slow simmering.
Mushrooms: Add earthy flavour and moisture that enrich the gravy as they cook.
Shallot or onion: Adds savoury sweetness and aroma to the stewing liquid as it softens.
Stock: Provides the cooking liquid that gently braises the meat and forms the gravy.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fatty flavour of the gravy.

The step that matters

Brown the lamb evenly. Browning creates deep savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction, which then carries into the gravy. Pale, unevenly browned meat yields a flatter-tasting stew, so the pieces should be turned until all sides colour.

“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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Breast of Lamb, Stewed with Mushrooms