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Oysters with Leg of Mutton

A leg of mutton is stuffed with minced oysters, shallot, parsley, and egg yolks, then boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Oysters with Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the forcemeat

  1. Make six deep incisions in the thick part of the leg of mutton.

  2. Boil the oysters in their own liquor for two minutes.

  3. Remove the gills from the oysters and mince them finely.

  4. Mix the minced oysters with the shallot, parsley, and egg yolks.

Cook and serve

  1. Fill the incisions in the mutton with the forcemeat and tie it in a cloth.

  2. Put the mutton into boiling water and let it boil.

  3. Reduce the heat and simmer gently for two and a half to three hours until cooked.

  4. Serve with oyster sauce.

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. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  2. Oyster + shallottop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together290 recipes

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

  3. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Mutton + oystertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Mutton + shallottop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together407 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
Forms the main body of the dish and carries the forcemeat during long simmering.
Oysters
Supply the savoury, briny flavour of the stuffing and the sauce.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Bind the minced oysters into a cohesive, sliceable forcemeat.
Shallot
Adds a mild, sharp aromatic backbone to the forcemeat.

The step that matters

Simmer gently rather than boil. A rolling boil toughens the meat's proteins and can break the forcemeat apart, so a gentle simmer keeps the mutton tender and the stuffing intact.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, oyster, shallot, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, oyster, shallot, egg. 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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