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Pressed Lamb

A lamb dish where the meat is boiled, chopped, pressed to remove juice, and sliced thin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lamb and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,165 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pressed Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the lamb

  1. Place the lamb in a pot and cover with water.

  2. Boil until tender, then season with salt and pepper.

  3. Keep cooking until the meat is very tender and most of the juice has evaporated.

Press and set

  1. Remove the meat from the pot and chop it like hash in a wooden bowl.

  2. Transfer the chopped meat to a bread pan and press out the juice.

  3. Place in a cool area to harden.

Serve

  1. Slice thinly to serve.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Main protein; long cooking softens its connective tissue, and pressing packs it into a firm, sliceable block.

The step that matters

Cooking until most of the juice has evaporated. Connective tissue in the lamb breaks down into gelatin as it cooks slowly. If too much liquid remains, the chopped meat will not press together and set firm when cooled.

“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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