Skip to main content
Main

Blanquette of Lamb

A lamb stew finished with a white sauce of butter, flour, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Blanquette of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the lamb

  1. Cut the lamb into pieces about 2 inches square.

  2. In a stewpan, combine the lamb, onion, herbs, peppercorns, and a little salt.

  3. Cover with cold water and cook gently for about 2 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a separate pan, add the flour, and stir for a few minutes without browning.

  2. Strain ½ pint of the cooking liquid from the meat and add it to the butter and flour mixture.

  3. Stir until boiling, then simmer for a few minutes.

  4. Beat together the egg yolk and cream or milk, then add to the sauce, stirring gently.

  5. Cook for a few minutes without boiling to prevent curdling.

Serve

  1. Arrange the meat on a hot dish, strain the sauce over it, and 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. Lamb + parsleytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,322 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, gentle cooking in liquid.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce when cooked with butter.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce, giving it a silky texture.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and moisture, mellowing the sauce when combined with the yolk.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk and cream without boiling. Egg proteins set when heated, so if the sauce boils after the yolk goes in, it can curdle and turn grainy. Stirring gently and keeping it just below a boil keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, parsley, thyme, butter, flour, egg, cream. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes