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Of Lamb

A slow‑cooked lamb dish simmered in butter, bacon, parsley, lemon, onion, pepper, and salt, finished with egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lamb

  1. Cut the lamb breast into 2‑inch square pieces.

  2. Wash, dry, and flour the pieces.

Make the butter sauce and cook

  1. In a pan, boil the butter, bacon, and parsley for 10 minutes.

  2. Add the lamb, lemon juice, onion, pepper, and salt to the pan.

  3. Simmer for 2 hours.

  4. Stir in the egg yolks.

  5. Shake the pan over the fire for 2 minutes.

  6. Serve hot.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb breast
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Coats the pieces, helping them brown and thickening the sauce slightly.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, rounded flavor to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Stirred in at the end, they thicken and enrich the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and meat flavors.
Bacon fat
Contributes savory, smoky flavor to the butter sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks. Yolks thicken the sauce as their proteins set at moderate heat. If the sauce is too hot, they scramble and curdle, so remove the pan from strong heat before stirring them in.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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