Skip to main content
Main

To Boil a Leg of Lamb

A boiled leg of lamb served with fried loin steaks, spinach, orange garnish, and butter.

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

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Boil a Leg of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the lamb

  1. Boil the leg of lamb in water for 1 hour until very white.

  2. Cut the loin into steaks, dip them in beaten egg, and coat with bread crumbs.

  3. Fry the steaks in a pan until nice and brown.

Prepare and serve

  1. Boil a good amount of spinach until tender, then drain.

  2. Place the spinach on a serving dish, put the leg of lamb in the center, and arrange the fried loin around it.

  3. Cut the orange into quarters and use it to garnish the dish.

  4. Serve with butter in a cup.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Lamb + spinachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together300 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Spinach + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together276 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lamb + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together598 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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 water gives the meat a gentle, moist cooking with a pale, even colour.
Loin of lamb
Cut into steaks and fried, its coating browns and crisps on the outside.
Bread crumbs
Coat the egg-dipped steaks, forming a crisp, browned crust when fried.
Egg
Binds the bread crumbs to the lamb steaks so the coating holds during frying.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, served alongside the dish for flavour.

The step that matters

Fry the steaks in a pan until nice and brown. The bread crumb coating needs enough heat and fat to brown and crisp without burning. Too little heat leaves it soft and greasy, while too much darkens the crumbs before the meat cooks through.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, bread, egg, spinach, butter):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, bread, egg, spinach, butter. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes