Name: Lamb As You Like It
Ingredients: choice cuts of lamb; mint sauce; currant jelly; vegetables; creamy mashed potatoes; cubes of fat or bread; seasonings; flour

Why it works: Lamb and potato work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 520 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Lamb As You Like It

Ingredients

Directions

Sear the lamb quickly on all sides over high heat.
Reduce the heat and cook slowly without liquid until done.
Serve hot with mint sauce, currant jelly, or other relishes.
For the crown roast, shape two strips of rib chops into a crown and have a butcher trim it.
Protect the ends of the bones with cubes of fat or bread to prevent charring.
Fill the cavity with creamy mashed potatoes and return to the oven until golden brown.

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.

Lamb + potatotop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together520 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Lamb + minttop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together772 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Lamb + breadtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together598 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Mint + potatotop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together363 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,355 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the currant

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

Limefits better
Avocadofits better
Lemonfits better
Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, mint, sauce, potato, bread, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.