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Roast Mutton, with Kidney Sauce

Roast mutton stuffed with bread and onion, served with a sauce made from the mutton kidney.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Roast Mutton, with Kidney Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the mutton and filling

  1. Remove the outer skin and excess fat from the loin of mutton, and take out the kidney for the sauce.

  2. Peel and chop the onion.

  3. Fry the onion in a frying pan with the mutton fat until light brown.

  4. Soak the stale bread in cold water until soft. Squeeze out the excess water from the soaked bread.

  5. Add the soaked bread to the fried onion. Season the mixture with salt and pepper. Stir until the mixture no longer sticks to the pan.

  6. Stuff the mutton with the bread mixture.

  7. Sew the cut part of the mutton closed with a large cord.

Roast the mutton

  1. Roast the stuffed mutton in a hot oven (400°F/200°C) until the surface is brown. Reduce the heat to moderate (350°F/175°C) and cook to the desired doneness.

  2. Baste the mutton occasionally with the drippings.

  3. Dredge the mutton with flour if a frothed surface is desired.

Make the kidney sauce

  1. Trim the membranes from the kidney. Chop the kidney finely.

  2. Brown the chopped kidney in a frying pan with the drippings.

  3. Place the cooked mutton on a hot dish and keep it warm.

  4. Pour out most of the drippings from the pan, leaving 2-3 tablespoons. Set the remaining drippings over the fire.

  5. Add the fried kidney and its gravy to the pan. Stir in a heaping tablespoon of flour. Continue stirring until the mixture is brown.

  6. Gradually stir in the pint of boiling water. Season with salt.

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Mutton + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

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

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton fat
Renders into the frying pan to cook the onion and add rich, savoury flavour.
Stale bread
Soaked and squeezed, it forms a moist, tender stuffing that holds the filling together.
Kidney
Browned and chopped, it adds deep, meaty flavour to the sauce.
Drippings
Basting fat that keeps the roast moist and builds the flavour of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it browns in the drippings, and gives a frothed surface when dredged on the roast.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in the drippings. Flour must be stirred until it turns brown in the fat before the water is added. Cooking out the raw starch gives the sauce a rich colour and nutty flavour and prevents a pasty taste. Adding liquid too early leaves lumps.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, bread, pepper, flour. 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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