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Minced Lamb on Toast

A dish of minced lamb seasoned and simmered in a thin gravy, served over buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Minced Lamb on Toast

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lamb

  1. Remove dry pieces of skin and gristle from the lamb and chop the meat.

Make the gravy

  1. Heat butter in a frying pan.

  2. Season the meat with salt, pepper, and celery salt.

  3. Moisten the meat with a little hot water or stock.

  4. Dredge the meat with flour.

  5. Stir the mixture.

  6. Add enough stock to make a thin gravy.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over small slices of buttered toast.

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. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Celery + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lamb + celerytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together371 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Remnants of cold roast lamb
Provides the main meat, which is chopped and warmed in the gravy.
Butter
Fat for frying the meat and enriching the flavor of the toast.
Flour
Coats the meat so the liquid thickens into a gravy.
Hot water or stock
Moistens the meat and forms the liquid that becomes the thin gravy.
Buttered toast
Soaks up the gravy as the base the dish is served on.

The step that matters

Dredge the meat with flour. Flour must be evenly coated over the meat before liquid is added, or it clumps and the gravy turns lumpy instead of smooth.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Celerythe original

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