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Mutton, Chicken

A roast of mutton and chicken cooked with water, bread, butter, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lamb and chicken match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 626 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Mutton, Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meats

  1. Clean the meats thoroughly and wash them.

  2. Rub salt on the meats.

  3. Stuff chickens or ducks with stale bread mixed with butter, seasoned with salt and black pepper.

Bake and finish

  1. Place the meats in the oven with sufficient water: 3 pints for veal, 1 quart for lamb or mutton, less for chickens or ducks.

  2. Bake a hind quarter of lamb for about 2 hours, veal for 2.5 hours, shoulder of mutton or ducks for 1.5 hours, and tender chickens for 30 minutes.

  3. If the meats are not very fatty, dress them with good sweet lard for veal or butter for chickens.

  4. Sprinkle a little flour on the meats when they are nearly done to achieve a nice brown color.

  5. About 10 minutes before the meat is done, make batter and stir it into the baking water and juice, seasoning with salt and black pepper.

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. Lamb + chickentop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Lamb + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Veal + chickentop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-butanedione (buttery, creamy).

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

Flour
Sprinkled on the meats near the end, it helps form a browned crust.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, moistening the stuffing and the chickens or ducks.
Stale loaf bread
Mixed with butter to make a soft stuffing that absorbs juices during baking.

The step that matters

Adding the batter to the baking water. Stirring batter into the hot pan liquid and juices about 10 minutes before the end thickens and flavours the sauce. Timing matters because the batter needs to cook through without overbaking or scorching.

“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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