Skip to main content
Main

Lamb in Light Gravy

A stewed dish of lamb pieces cooked in broth and thickened with flour and sour cream.

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

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lamb in Light Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Cut the lamb into pieces and rub with salt and pepper.

  2. Melt the butter in a kettle and add the lamb, turning it once.

  3. Add the broth immediately.

Make the gravy and cook

  1. Mix the flour with the sour cream and pour it slowly into the kettle.

  2. Let it boil for a moment.

  3. Cover the kettle tightly and place it in the Caloric for 1 hour and 15 minutes, using one radiator.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  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. Lamb + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together469 recipes

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

  5. Butter + meattop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Lamb
Forms the main body of the dish and carries the rich meat flavor.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor, and helps the lamb brown when it first hits the pan.
Broth
Provides the cooking liquid that moistens the meat and forms the base of the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a light gravy as its starch swells with heat.
Sour cream
Adds creaminess and a mild tang that lightens and rounds the gravy.

The step that matters

Pouring in the flour and sour cream mixture. Stirring flour into sour cream first and adding it slowly keeps the starch from clumping. Sour cream is acidic and can separate when it gets too hot, so the gravy should be kept at a gentle boil rather than a hard one.

“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.

You might also like

Meat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipesMeatballsMeatballs37 recipesMince MeatMince Meat37 recipesMeat CakesMeat Cakes35 recipes