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A Leg of Mutton Boiled

A boiled leg of mutton wrapped in flour-dusted cloth, cooked for 1.5 hours and cooled to keep it white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Mutton and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,695 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells grass, green. The science ↓

A Leg of Mutton Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Flour a cloth and tightly tie the leg of mutton in it.

Boil

  1. Put the wrapped mutton into boiling water.

  2. Boil for 1.5 hours.

Finish

  1. After boiling, place the mutton in a pan and pour cold water over it.

  2. Let it sit for 2 minutes before removing the cloth to keep the mutton white.

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. Mutton + flourtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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 whole and gently in the boiling water.
Flour
Dusted on the cloth so the wrapping does not stick to the meat.

The step that matters

Removing the cloth after the cold-water rinse. Letting the mutton rest briefly before unwrapping, as the record directs, helps the surface firm up so the cloth releases cleanly and the meat keeps a pale, white appearance.

“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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