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Boiled Leg of Mutton

A boiled leg of mutton cooked with turnip slices and served with caper sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,842 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the mutton

  1. Place the mutton in a pot of boiling water to cover.

  2. Boil for 15 minutes, then reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes per pound.

  3. Add the turnip slices 30 minutes before the meat is done.

Serve

  1. Remove the meat to a hot platter and garnish with turnip.

  2. Top with chopped parsley or capers and serve with caper sauce.

  3. Save the cooking water for soups.

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. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mutton + turniptop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,558 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  3. Turnip + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together943 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Parsley + saucetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,693 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. 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
Provides the main meat, which turns tender as its connective tissue softens during long, gentle simmering.
Turnip
Cooks in the pot to become soft and mildly sweet, adding a gentle vegetable flavor to the dish.

The step that matters

Simmer gently after the initial boil. Once the meat has boiled briefly, reducing the heat to a gentle simmer keeps the muscle fibers relaxed. A hard, rolling boil for the whole cooking time tightens the meat and makes it tougher.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Celeryfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, turnip, sauce. 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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