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To Boil Mutton

A boiled leg of mutton served with melted butter, capers, and dumplings, accompanied by mashed turnips, carrots, and whole turnips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 145 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Boil Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and boil

  1. Wash the leg of mutton clean and trim the shank bone and knuckle.

  2. Place the mutton in a pot and cover it with water.

  3. Boil gently for three hours, skimming the surface regularly.

  4. Remove from heat and cover the pot to let it steam for 10–15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the mutton with melted butter mixed with capers or nasturtians.

  2. Accompany the mutton with mashed turnips, carrots, and whole turnips.

Make the dumplings

  1. For dumplings, mix finely chopped suet with double the amount of flour and a little cold water.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Capers + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 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

Mutton
Long gentle boiling turns the tough connective tissue tender, giving a moist, falling-apart meat.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the dumplings and keeps them moist and tender as they cook.
Flour
Forms the structure of the dumplings, binding the suet and water into a dough.
Capers
Add a sharp, acidic bite that cuts through the richness of the butter and meat.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and smoothness into the sauce served with the mutton.

The step that matters

Boil gently for three hours, skimming the surface. A gentle simmer, not a rolling boil, lets collagen in the mutton break down slowly without toughening the meat; skimming removes foam that would cloud the broth.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, butter, capers, turnip, carrot, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, butter, capers, turnip, carrot, flour. 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 mutton recipes

Leg 48with Caper Sauce 14Neck 12Shoulder 9Breast 7Shoulder with Oysters 7 See all 59 →

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