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Boiled Leg of Mutton

A leg of mutton boiled slowly in salted water, served with parsley garnish and optional drawn butter, egg sauce, or caper sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Boiled Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the shank bone and trim it round.

  2. Wash the leg of mutton thoroughly.

  3. Place it in a pot of hot salted water.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil slowly for three hours, removing the scum as it rises.

  2. Once done, place it on a dish and garnish with sprigs of double parsley.

  3. Serve with drawn butter, egg sauce, or 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. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Mutton + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Mutton + parsleytop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,915 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

Leg of mutton
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender and juicy during long, gentle simmering.
Salt
Seasons the cooking water so the meat is flavoured from the outside in.

The step that matters

Boil slowly, skimming the scum. Gentle simmering keeps the meat tender, while a vigorous boil toughens muscle fibres and churns the scum back into the liquid, clouding it and spoiling the texture.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, butter):

  1. Pepperfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, butter. 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.

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