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Boiled Leg of Lamb

A boiled leg of lamb served with a garnish of carrots, turnips, or cauliflower, and topped with butter sauce and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boiled Leg of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Soak the leg of lamb in warm water for over 2 hours.

  2. Wrap the lamb in a cloth and boil it slowly for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Once cooked, dish it up and garnish with a border of carrots, turnips, or cauliflower.

  2. Wrap a cut paper around the shank bone and serve with plain parsley and butter sauce poured over it.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Turnip + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cauliflower + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of lamb
Is the main cut, cooked whole so it stays moist and tender through slow simmering.

The step that matters

Boil it slowly. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil keeps the meat tender and prevents the outer fibers from toughening and drying out.

Swap the cauliflower

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lamb, carrot, turnip, parsley, butter, sauce):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Cauliflowerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lamb, carrot, turnip, parsley, butter, sauce. 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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