Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Breast of Lamb

A slow‑cooked lamb breast stew with peas, onion, mint, and a flour‑based gravy.

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

Why it works: Peas and mint are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,137 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Stewed Breast of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Brown the chopped onion in a little oil in a pot.

  2. Add the breast of lamb and cook until browned on all sides.

  3. Sprinkle the flour over the meat and stir well.

  4. Add enough water to cover the meat and bring to a boil.

  5. Reduce heat and simmer for about 1 hour.

  6. Add the green peas and mint, and cook for an additional 30 minutes.

  7. Remove excess grease with a spoon or blotting paper.

Serve

  1. Serve the stew on a hot dish, arranging the meat in the center with peas and gravy around it.

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. Peas + minttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Mint + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,372 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

  5. Lamb + minttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together772 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 main meat, which becomes tender as it simmers slowly in liquid.
Green peas
Add sweetness and a soft texture to the stew as they cook through.
Onion
Browned at the start, it builds savory depth for the stew base.
Flour
Stirred into the browned meat, it helps thicken the cooking liquid into a gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the meat. Searing the lamb until well browned on all sides builds deep, roasted flavor through the Maillard reaction. Pale meat gives a flatter-tasting stew.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, peas, mint, flour, pepper):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, peas, mint, flour, pepper. 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.

More stewed lamb breast recipes

with Mushrooms 4 See all 9 →

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes