Name: Breast of Lamb, Stewed with Mushrooms
Ingredients: 1 breast of lamb; 2 tablespoons butter; salt; pepper; 1 teaspoon chopped parsley; 1 shallot or small onion, finely minced; ½ pint mushrooms; stock (enough to barely cover the meat); a few drops of lemon juice

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Breast of Lamb, Stewed with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

Remove the bones from the lamb.
Melt butter in a saucepan and add the meat.
Brown the meat evenly on all sides.

Stew

Sprinkle with salt and pepper, then add parsley, shallot, and mushrooms.
Pour in stock to barely cover the meat and simmer gently for 1 hour.
Ten minutes before serving, add lemon juice to the gravy.

Serve

Place the lamb on a hot dish, arrange mushrooms around it, and strain the gravy over all.
Serve immediately.

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.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,737 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb breast: Provides the meat that becomes tender during slow, gentle simmering.
Butter: Fat for browning the meat and building flavour in the pan.
Mushrooms: Add earthy flavour and moisture to the gravy as they cook.
Stock: Liquid that simmers the meat and forms the gravy.
Shallot: Adds mild sweetness and aromatic depth to the gravy.

The step that matters

Brown the meat evenly on all sides. Browning creates flavourful Maillard reactions on the surface. Uneven browning leaves pale patches, so the stewed gravy tastes flatter and less rich.

“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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Mushroom Soup60 recipes

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Meatballs37 recipes

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Breast of Lamb, Stewed with Mushrooms