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Crown Roast of Lamb

A roast lamb shaped into a crown, tied and basted, served with potatoes, peas, and mint sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Crown Roast of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crown

  1. Sew the two racks of lamb together to form a circle, cutting through the backbone and trimming the meat down to the eye of the meat.

  2. Turn down the long strip of meat to partially fill the center of the crown.

  3. Wrap the ends of the bones in oil paper or strips of salt pork to prevent burning.

  4. Tie or skewer the crown to keep the bones evenly spaced.

Roast and serve

  1. Baste the meat with salt pork fat or bacon fat while cooking for one hour.

  2. Decorate the ends of the ribs with frilled paper to catch candle wax.

  3. Fill the center of the crown with browned potatoes and arrange tender green peas around the crown.

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

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

  2. Pork + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Lamb + porktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together623 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Potato + peastop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,016 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Lamb + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together520 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Racks of lamb
Form the main structure and meat of the crown roast.
Salt pork fat or bacon fat
Basting fat that adds moisture and browning to the surface of the meat.
Butter
Adds richness and helps browning on the meat and potatoes.
Browned potatoes
Fill the center of the crown as a starchy side that is browned for color and flavor.

The step that matters

Wrapping the exposed bone ends. Bare rib bones scorch easily during a long roast, so wrapping them in paper or salt pork shields them from direct heat and keeps them from burning.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, pork, butter, potato, peas, 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.

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