Skip to main content
Main

Loin of Lamb Stewed in Butter

A lamb joint stewed slowly in butter, served with optional sauces and salad.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lamb and asparagus work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 207 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Loin of Lamb Stewed in Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the lamb joint and dry it thoroughly.

  2. Skewer down the flank and place it in a thick saucepan with the melted butter.

Cook

  1. Simmer gently over low heat for 2 hours and 15 minutes, turning it halfway through.

  2. Remove the lamb, skim the gravy, and pour it over the meat.

Serve

  1. Serve with asparagus, cucumber, or soubise sauce, or brown gravy, mint sauce, and a salad.

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 + asparagustop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together207 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Lamb + minttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together772 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Asparagus + minttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together153 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. White pepper + minttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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 joint
Provides the main meat, whose slow cooking softens connective tissue into a tender texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and keeping the meat moist as it cooks.

The step that matters

Simmer gently over low heat. Low, gentle heat keeps the butter from scorching and lets the connective tissue in the lamb soften slowly, so the meat stays tender rather than tough.

Swap the mint

The recipe marks mint as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, butter, white pepper, asparagus, sauce):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, butter, white pepper, asparagus, sauce. 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

Asparagus SoupAsparagus Soup179 recipesAsparagus SaladAsparagus Salad77 recipesCream of AsparagusCream of Asparagus38 recipesBoiled AsparagusBoiled Asparagus27 recipes