Name: Saddle of Mutton
Ingredients: 1 saddle of mutton (about 10 pounds); Coarse sea salt; Flour for dredging

Why it works: Mutton and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,695 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells grass, green. The science ↓

Saddle of Mutton

Ingredients

1 saddle of mutton (about 10 pounds)
Coarse sea salt
Flour for dredging

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Remove the skin from the saddle of mutton.
Run a skewer through the spinal marrow bone, attaching it to a larger skewer with a holdfast at one end and string at the other.
Tie the skin over the back of the mutton.

Roast and serve

Roast in a 400°F (200°C) oven for about 1 hour and 20 minutes.
Remove the paper 10 minutes before taking it from the oven.
Dredge with flour to give it a nice color and make gravy.
Serve.

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.

Mutton + flourtop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,695 recipes

Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Saddle of mutton: Provides the large cut of meat that is roasted as the main dish.
Flour: Dredging on the surface helps brown the exterior and thicken the pan juices into gravy.

“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.