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Boiled Leg of Lamb or Mutton

A boiled leg of lamb or mutton cooked with rice and served with caper sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lamb and rice work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 439 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Leg of Lamb or Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Put the leg of lamb or mutton into a kettle of boiling water and add 1 cup of well-washed rice.

  2. When the water boils, skim it carefully.

  3. Let it boil rapidly for 15 minutes.

  4. Then reduce the heat to simmer for 2 hours.

  5. For more well-done meat, cook for an additional 15 minutes.

  6. Serve with caper sauce.

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. Lamb + ricetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together439 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Rice + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,396 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Lamb + saucetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together925 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (soapy, waxy).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of lamb or mutton
The main cut, which becomes tender through long simmering in the water.
Well-washed rice
Added to the cooking water, where it may help thicken the broth as it cooks.

The step that matters

Skimming the water when it boils. Foam and fat rise to the surface as the water heats. Removing them early keeps the broth clearer and less greasy over the long simmer.

“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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