Skip to main content
Main

Lamb

A whole lamb roasted on a spit, basted with its own drippings, served with gravy and mint sauce.

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

Why it works: Lamb and mint work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 772 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Lamb

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fasten the lamb with string or skewers.

  2. Set the piece on the spit lengthwise.

  3. Run a wooden skewer through the two legs to hold them firm.

  4. Wrap the lamb and saddle with greased paper.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast for 1 hour and 15 minutes, basting with drippings.

  2. Ten minutes before removing from the fire, take off the paper and salt the meat.

  3. Dish the lamb and serve with gravy and mint sauce.

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

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

  2. Lamb + saucetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together925 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (soapy, waxy).

  3. Mint + saucetop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together568 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Is the main meat; its fat and connective tissue render and baste the joint as it roasts.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the surface of the meat once the paper is removed, so it browns and crisps slightly.
Good gravy
Adds moisture and savoury depth to the sliced meat at serving.

The step that matters

Removing the paper and salting the meat. Salting only in the final ten minutes keeps the surface dry enough to brown and crisp, while the greased paper protected the meat from drying out earlier. Timing matters because removing the paper too early lets the surface dry and overcook.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, sauce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes