Skip to main content
Main

Lamb’s Fry

A fried lamb liver served with a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lamb’s Fry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and fry

  1. Slice the liver and sprinkle it well with flour.

  2. Heat the butter in a frying pan and fry the liver quickly.

  3. Transfer the fried liver to a stew pan.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Pour the stock into the frying pan and heat it.

  2. Once hot, pour the stock over the liver and simmer gently for 30 minutes.

  3. Mix the flour with cold water to create a slurry and thicken the gravy.

  4. Let the gravy boil, then dish up the liver and garnish with mashed potatoes.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lamb + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Lamb + flourtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb's liver
Forms the main protein; its texture depends on brief frying and gentle simmering.
Stock
Provides the liquid that becomes the gravy and keeps the liver moist.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks and helps lightly coat the liver for browning.
Dripping or butter
Conducts heat for frying and adds fat for browning and rich flavour.

The step that matters

Fry the liver quickly. A brief fry over good heat browns the outside and keeps the inside tender. Prolonged cooking toughens liver proteins and makes it dry and grainy, so the frying time should be kept short.

“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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes