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Lamb Stew

A lamb stew made by boiling lamb pieces, seasoning with pepper, salt, butter, and a flour thickener, served over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lamb Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Boil the lamb pieces in enough water to cover them until tender.

  2. Season the cooked lamb with pepper, coarse sea salt, and butter.

  3. Add a thickening made from flour and water.

Serve

  1. Toast the bread until nice and brown.

  2. Cut the toasted bread into squares.

  3. Cover a platter with the toasted bread.

  4. Pour the stew over the toasted bread.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (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 + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together598 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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
Provides the main body and rich meaty flavor of the stew as it cooks until tender.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, rounding out the seasoning of the cooked lamb.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a stew with a smoother, heavier consistency.
Bread
Toasted and browned, it forms a crisp base that soaks up the stew at serving.

The step that matters

Add the flour thickening gradually. Flour thickens liquid by swelling its starch as it heats. Adding it as a lump or all at once can leave clumps, so mix it smoothly with water first and stir it in while the stew is hot.

“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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