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Fricasee Lamb

Fricassee Lamb is a dish of boiled lamb pieces coated in flour, browned in butter, served with a brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lamb and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,165 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Fricasee Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the lamb

  1. Cut the lamb into pieces and boil until tender.

  2. Remove the meat and roll it in flour seasoned with salt and pepper.

  3. Brown the meat in butter in a hot frying pan.

  4. Place the meat on a hot platter.

Make the sauce

  1. Make a brown sauce with the cooking liquid, removing fat.

  2. Thicken the sauce with 2 tablespoons of flour and 2 tablespoons of butter, seasoning to taste.

  3. Pour the sauce over the meat.

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 + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Flour and butter 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 forequarter
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long boiling.
Flour
Coats the meat for browning and thickens the sauce for body.
Butter
Browns the meat and enriches the sauce with fat and flavour.
Cooking liquid
Forms the base of the brown sauce, carrying flavour from the boiled lamb.

The step that matters

Browning the floured meat in butter. The meat must be dry and the pan hot so it browns rather than steams. Flour browns through the Maillard reaction, and crowding the pan lowers the temperature and leaves the meat grey and soft.

“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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