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Roast Leg of Mutton with Caper Sauce

Roast leg of mutton served with caper sauce, mashed potatoes, turnips, stewed tomatoes, and baked apple dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,798 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Roast Leg of Mutton with Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the mutton

  1. Boil the leg of mutton until tender.

  2. Remove from water and roast in the oven until browned.

Prepare the accompaniments

  1. Prepare the caper sauce and serve it over the roasted mutton.

  2. Make mashed potatoes and turnips as sides.

  3. Prepare stewed tomatoes and baked apple dumplings to accompany the dish.

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. Potato + tomatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,798 recipes

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

  2. Potato + turniptop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + tomatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together463 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenol (green, grassy).

  4. Tomato + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together548 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of mutton
Provides the main meat, which is boiled until tender and then roasted to brown the surface.

The step that matters

Remove from water and roast in the oven until browned. Boiling first makes the meat tender, but it leaches flavour and leaves the surface pale. A hot roast afterwards browns the exterior through the Maillard reaction, adding savoury flavour and colour that the boiled meat lacks.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, sauce, potato, turnip, tomato):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Cherryfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, sauce, potato, turnip, tomato. 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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