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Roast Leg of Lamb

Lamb neck cutlets coated in breadcrumbs and fried, served around boiled green peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Roast Leg of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cutlets

  1. Trim the cutlets by removing the thick part of the chine bone, skin, and excess fat.

  2. Clean the bones.

  3. Brush each cutlet with the beaten yolk of egg.

  4. Sprinkle cutlets with seasoned bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Dip each cutlet in clarified butter and sprinkle more crumbs on top.

  2. Fry the cutlets, turning occasionally until golden brown.

  3. Boil the green peas until tender and arrange them in a pyramid shape on a hot dish.

  4. Drain the cutlets and place them around the green peas.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Bread + peastop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together804 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexyl acetate (fruity, apple).

  3. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Pepper + peastop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 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

Egg yolk
Binds the bread crumbs to the cutlet so the coating stays in place while frying.
Fine bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden crust around the cutlet when fried.
Clarified butter
Fat that conducts heat evenly and promotes browning and a rich flavour in the crust.
Green peas
Provide the sweet, tender vegetable base that the cutlets are arranged around.

The step that matters

Fry the cutlets, turning occasionally until golden brown. Fat and heat brown the crumb coating through the Maillard reaction, but too little heat leaves the crust pale and greasy, while too much burns it before the meat cooks through. Turning helps the coating colour evenly.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Peasthe original
  2. Walnutfits about as well
  3. Lima beansfits about as well
  4. Pecansfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, bread, pepper, butter. 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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