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Larks, a LA Minute

A quick sauté of larks with butter, pepper, salt, Espagnole sauce, mushrooms, glaze, lemon juice, served with fried croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Larks, a LA Minute

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the legs and remove the gizzards from the larks using a small knife.

  2. In a deep skillet, melt the butter and add the larks.

  3. Season with pepper and salt, and fry over medium heat until browned and nearly cooked.

Make the sauce

  1. Pour off excess grease, then add the Espagnole sauce, mushrooms, glaze, butter, and lemon juice.

  2. Toss everything together until well mixed.

Serve

  1. Serve the larks with fried croutons around them, and pour the mushroom sauce over the top.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  4. Mushroom + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Larks
Provide the lean, delicate meat that is the centrepiece of the dish.
Butter
Carries heat for frying and adds richness and browning to the larks and sauce.
Espagnole sauce
Forms the base of the brown sauce, adding body and savoury depth.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and a soft, moist texture to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances its fat.

The step that matters

Fry the larks until browned and nearly cooked. Small birds cook quickly and dry out easily. Browning over medium heat builds flavour through the Maillard reaction, while stopping just short of fully cooked keeps the meat tender, since it finishes cooking when tossed in the hot sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, sauce, mushroom, bread):

  1. Plumfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Avocadofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sauce, mushroom, 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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