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Lamb Chops a LA Maintenon

Breaded lamb chops fried until golden, served with optional spinach or mashed potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lamb and spinach work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 300 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Lamb Chops a LA Maintenon

Ingredients

Directions

Bread the chops

  1. Dip the lamb chops in the egg.

  2. Coat the chops in bread crumbs.

Cook and serve

  1. Fry the breaded chops until golden brown.

  2. Serve with spinach or mashed potatoes, placing the vegetable in the center and arranging the chops around it.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + spinachtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Egg + spinachtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,323 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb chops
Main protein that is cooked and served as the centrepiece of the dish.
Egg
Binds the bread crumbs to the chops so the coating adheres during frying.
Bread crumbs
Forms a crisp, golden coating that browns when the chops are fried.

The step that matters

Fry the breaded chops until golden brown. Frying at a steady heat browns the crumb coating through the Maillard reaction while cooking the lamb. Too little heat leaves the coating soggy and greasy, while too much browns the crumbs before the meat is cooked through.

Swap the spinach

The recipe marks spinach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, egg, bread):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Spinachthe original
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Potatofits about as well

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