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Boiled Leg of Mutton or Lamb

A boiled leg of mutton or lamb served with caper sauce and parsley garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,762 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Boiled Leg of Mutton or Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe the leg with a damp towel and dust it thickly with flour.

  2. Wrap the leg in cheesecloth and place it in a large kettle of boiling water.

Boil and simmer

  1. Ensure the leg is fully covered with water, cover the kettle, and boil for five minutes.

  2. Reduce heat and simmer for fifteen minutes for each pound of meat.

  3. Add salt when the leg is halfway done.

Serve

  1. Once cooked, carefully remove the cheesecloth, dish the leg, and garnish with parsley.

  2. Trim the bone with quilled paper and serve with caper 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. Rice + parsleytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,762 recipes

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

  2. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Rice + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mutton + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of mutton or lamb
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering in water.
Flour
Forms a thick coating on the surface of the meat during cooking.

The step that matters

Reduce to a simmer after the initial boil. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil avoids toughening the muscle fibres and helps the meat cook evenly to the centre.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, rice, flour, sauce):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, rice, flour, 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.

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