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Boiled Mutton

A boiled mutton leg served with a butter‑flour sauce flavored with parsley and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Boiled Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the mutton

  1. Place the leg of mutton in boiling water and cook for 15 minutes per pound.

  2. Reserve 1 cup of the cooking liquid.

Make the sauce

  1. Cool the reserved liquid to remove the fat.

  2. In a saucepan, heat the reserved liquid.

  3. Stir in the butter and flour mixed with cold water and stir for 5 minutes.

  4. Add the chopped parsley and bring the sauce to a boil.

  5. Remove the sauce from heat and stir in the lemon juice.

Finish and serve

  1. Lightly sprinkle the mutton with coarse sea salt as soon as it is removed from the fire.

  2. Serve the sauce in a boat.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton leg
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long gentle simmering in water.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the reserved cooking liquid into a smooth sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fatty sauce.

The step that matters

Cooling the reserved liquid to remove the fat. Fat from the cooking liquid floats and would make the sauce greasy and split. Chilling lets the fat solidify on top so it can be lifted off before reheating.

“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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