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Lamb Stewed with Peas

A lamb stew cooked with peas, salt, flour, butter, and served with boiled new potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Peas and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,016 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Lamb Stewed with Peas

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Place the lamb pieces in a stewpan and cover with water.

  2. Cover the pan and simmer for 10 minutes.

  3. Remove any scum that forms on the surface.

  4. Add the salt and shelled peas, then cover the pan again.

  5. Let the mixture stew for 30 minutes.

  6. Mix the flour with the butter and stir into the stew.

  7. Simmer for an additional 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled new potatoes.

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. Peas + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,016 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Lamb + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together520 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Lamb + peastop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together650 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Breast of lamb
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a looser, more cohesive stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and smooths the sauce.
Shelled peas
Add sweetness and a bright green colour to the stew.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour and butter. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps easily. Mixing it with the butter first coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly and thicken the stew smoothly without lumps.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Peasthe original

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