Name: Boiled Mutton
Ingredients: 1 leg of mutton; hot water; coarse sea salt; egg-sauce; 1 tea-cup capers (or cucumber pickles, chopped fine)

Why it works: Mutton and tea work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 133 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Place the leg of mutton in a large pot and cover it with hot water.
Boil steadily and skim the surface well, keeping the pot covered by adding more hot water as needed.
Cook for 15 minutes for each pound of meat.
Add coarse sea salt when the meat is nearly done.
Serve with egg-sauce and a tea-cup of capers stirred in, or use chopped cucumber pickles as a substitute.

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.

Mutton + teatop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together133 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Mutton + saucetop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,087 recipes

Shared aroma: decanoic acid (soapy, waxy).
Mutton + eggtop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,648 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Egg + teatop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together821 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Sauce + teatop 36% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together68 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: Is the main cut of meat that is cooked through by gentle boiling.
Capers: Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the richness of the boiled meat.

“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.