Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Leg of Mutton

A leg of mutton boiled until tender, served with a butter‑flour sauce and capers, garnished with boiled cauliflower and parsley.

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

Why it works: Capers and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the mutton

  1. Place the leg of mutton in boiling water with a little coarse sea salt.

  2. Boil for two hours or more until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pan, melt ½ cup of butter.

  2. Stir 1 tablespoon of flour into the melted butter until smooth.

  3. Gradually add 1 pint of boiling water to the butter-flour mixture, stirring constantly.

  4. Add 1 tablespoon of capers to the sauce and mix well.

Serve

  1. Serve the mutton in a gravy dish, topped with the sauce, and garnish with boiled cauliflower and parsley.

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. Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Capers + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cauliflower + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + cauliflowertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together569 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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, becoming tender through long gentle boiling.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and gives it a rich, smooth body.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter into a smooth base for the sauce.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts the richness of the butter sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the flour into the butter and add the water gradually. Flour must be cooked briefly in fat before liquid is added, and the boiling water must be poured in slowly while stirring constantly. This prevents lumps and lets the starch thicken the sauce evenly and smoothly.

Swap the cauliflower

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Cauliflowerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, butter, flour, capers, parsley. 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 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipesMutton SoupMutton Soup56 recipesCauliflower SoupCauliflower Soup28 recipes