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Mutton Roasted in Browned Butter

A roasted mutton leg cooked with browned butter, turnips, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,874 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Mutton Roasted in Browned Butter

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the turnips

  1. Brown the butter and sugar in a pan.

  2. Add the turnips and toss them a few times.

  3. Pour in the stock or water.

  4. Season with salt.

  5. Sprinkle flour over the turnips.

  6. Let the turnips boil briefly.

Brown the mutton and braise

  1. Heat the drippings or butter in another pan.

  2. Brown the mutton on all sides.

  3. Add the turnips to the mutton.

  4. Let it boil for five minutes.

  5. Transfer the covered kettle to a preheated oven at 300°F (150°C) for two hours.

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 + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton leg
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during long, slow cooking.
Turnips
Absorb the browned butter and stock, adding body and mild sweetness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce around the turnips and meat.
Butter
Browned in the pan, it adds nutty aroma and rich flavour to the turnips.
Sugar
Caramelises with the butter, adding browning and a touch of sweetness.

The step that matters

Brown the mutton on all sides. Searing creates Maillard browning, which builds deep savoury flavour in the meat and the pan drippings that carry into the sauce. Pale, under-seared meat tastes flat.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

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