Name: Breast of Lamb, Stewed with Mushrooms
Ingredients: 1 breast of lamb; ½ pint mushrooms, or 1 tin mushrooms; 1 teaspoon chopped parsley; 1 shallot or small onion, finely minced; Salt and pepper to taste; Stock to barely cover the meat; Butter for cooking; 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

1 breast of lamb
½ pint mushrooms, or 1 tin mushrooms
1 teaspoon chopped parsley
1 shallot or small onion, finely minced
Salt and pepper to taste
Stock to barely cover the meat
Butter for cooking
A few drops of lemon juice

Directions

Prepare and brown

Remove the bones from the lamb.
Melt a little butter in a saucepan and add the lamb.
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 a few drops of lemon juice to the gravy.

Serve

Serve the lamb on a hot dish, with mushrooms around it, and strain the gravy over.

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).
Parsley + peppertop 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).
Mushroom + shallottop 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: Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender during slow simmering.
Mushrooms: Add earthy flavour and moisture to the gravy as they cook.
Stock: Provides the liquid that gently cooks the meat and forms the gravy.
Shallot: Adds a mild savoury sweetness that blends into the gravy.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 1 hour. A gentle simmer lets the connective tissue in the lamb break down slowly, producing tender meat. A hard boil toughens the muscle fibres and can leave the meat dry and stringy.

“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