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Boiled Mutton

A boiled mutton shoulder or leg, wrapped in flour-dusted cloth, served with butter sauce and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mutton and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,695 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells grass, green. The science ↓

Boiled Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the meat

  1. Boil a shoulder of mutton for about 1 hour or a leg for 1.5 to 2 hours, depending on size.

  2. Check tenderness with a knitting needle.

Wrap in cloth

  1. Soak a cloth in scalding water and wring it out.

  2. Dredge the cloth thickly with flour.

  3. Wrap the meat tightly with the cloth.

Boil and rest

  1. Place the wrapped meat in a large kettle of boiling water.

  2. Add the coarse sea salt to the water.

  3. Transfer the meat, cloth and all, to a pan.

  4. Cover the pan with cold water for a few minutes.

  5. Remove the cloth.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately with a smooth butter sauce and capers on the side.

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. Mutton + flourtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Tough connective tissue softens into tender meat during long, gentle boiling.

The step that matters

Checking tenderness before unwrapping. Mutton's connective tissue turns to gelatin only after sustained gentle heat. Pulling the meat too early leaves it tough, so test with a knitting needle until it slides in easily.

“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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