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Cold Roast Leg Op Mutton

A cold roast leg of mutton cooked with veal forcemeat, onions, parsley, bay leaves, carrots, and turnips, served with gravy.

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

Cold Roast Leg Op Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the leg

  1. Cut off the large end of the leg to make the fillet flat.

  2. Remove the bone from the fillet and replace it with veal forcemeat.

Cook the meat

  1. Place the meat, bones, knuckle, and trimmings in a pot.

  2. Cover with water or broth and bring to a boil.

  3. Add onions, parsley, bay leaves, carrots, and turnips.

  4. Simmer gently for nearly 2 hours.

Finish

  1. Thicken the gravy with spices or store sauce before serving.

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
Main meat; slow simmering softens its connective tissue and enriches the broth.
Veal forcemeat
Fills the boned cavity, adding moisture and a soft, binding texture to the slices.
Onions
Add aroma and savoury sweetness to the cooking liquid.
Carrots
Sweetness and body in the broth that later becomes the gravy.
Turnips
Mild sweetness and earthy flavour that rounds out the broth.

The step that matters

Simmer gently, do not boil hard. Vigorous boiling toughens the muscle fibres and can break the meat apart. Gentle heat lets connective tissue slowly soften into gelatin, leaving the meat tender and the broth rich.

Swap the onion

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

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

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