Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Leg of Mutton

A leg of mutton boiled with onion, salt, and served with parsley or celery garnish, carrots, mashed turnips, and caper sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boiled Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the shank bone and trim the knuckle of the leg of mutton.

  2. Wash and wipe it clean.

Boil

  1. Place the leg of mutton in a pot of boiling water and add the peeled onion.

  2. Boil until no blood follows an incision with a fork, about 2 hours and 15 minutes after the water begins to simmer.

  3. Skim the water well and add a little salt.

Serve

  1. Serve garnished with parsley or celery leaves, alongside boiled carrots and mashed turnips, with caper sauce in a tureen.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of mutton
Is the main meat, which becomes tender and juicy as it simmers slowly in water.
Onion
Adds a mild aromatic flavour to the cooking water that subtly seasons the meat.
Caper sauce
Adds a sharp, acidic contrast that cuts through the richness of the boiled mutton.

The step that matters

Boil until no blood follows an incision. Boiling must continue until the meat is fully cooked through and no blood runs from the thickest part. Stopping early leaves the meat undercooked, while the gentle simmer keeps the fibres tender rather than tough.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, meat, parsley, carrot, 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.

More boiled leg of mutton recipes

with Caper Sauce 5with Tongue and Turnips 4 See all 96 →

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipesMutton SoupMutton Soup56 recipes