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Roast Breast of Lamb

Roast lamb breast seasoned with bread crumbs, parsley, salt, and pepper, served with watercress and hot mint sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 469 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Roast Breast of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Roast the lamb

  1. Select a nice breast of lamb and place it before a clear fire.

  2. Mix the stale bread crumbs, minced parsley, salt, and pepper thoroughly.

  3. After about 15 minutes, when the fat begins to melt, sprinkle the mixture evenly over the lamb.

Finish and serve

  1. When cooked, skim the fat from the gravy and strain it over the lamb.

  2. Garnish with watercresses and serve with hot 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. Parsley + watercresstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + minttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,198 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + minttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,372 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

Breast of lamb
Provides the rich, fatty meat that is roasted and served as the main dish.
Stale bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden crust on the lamb as the coating absorbs the melting fat.
Minced parsley
Adds fresh, herbal aroma and color to the crumb coating.

The step that matters

Sprinkling the crumb mixture. The coating should go on only once the fat has begun to melt. Melted fat moistens the crumbs so they brown and stick, while a dry surface would let them fall off or scorch.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, bread, parsley, pepper, watercress, 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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