Name: Poke Quarter of Lamb
Ingredients: 1 quarter of lamb; juice of 1 lemon or Seville orange

Why it works: Lamb and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,127 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Poke Quarter of Lamb

Ingredients

1 quarter of lamb
juice of 1 lemon or Seville orange

Directions

Roast the quarter of lamb until cooked through.
Remove the shoulder and squeeze lemon or orange juice on the cut surface.
Carve the shoulder as you would mutton.
Separate the neck from the breast, which is the most esteemed part.
Ask guests for their preference: shoulder, neck, or breast, and serve accordingly.

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.

Lamb + lemontop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,127 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

Lamb: Provides the main meat, whose richness and tenderness come from slow roasting.
Lemon or seville orange: Its acidic juice brightens the flavour of the rich lamb on the cut surface.

“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.