Name: To Boil a Leg of Lamb
Ingredients: 1 leg of lamb (about 6 pounds); ½ cup coarse sea salt; 1 thin white cloth, floured; A good-sized bundle of sweet herbs; Parsley for garnish; Lemon slices for garnish

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Boil a Leg of Lamb

Ingredients

1 leg of lamb (about 6 pounds)
½ cup coarse sea salt
1 thin white cloth, floured
A good-sized bundle of sweet herbs
Parsley for garnish
Lemon slices for garnish

Directions

Prepare

Place the leg of lamb in a pot and cover it with clear, cold, soft water.
Let it soak for 30 minutes.
Add ½ cup of coarse sea salt to the water.
Wrap the lamb in the floured cloth and place it back in the pot.
Add enough water to cover the lamb and include the bundle of sweet herbs.

Boil and serve

Boil for 1.5 hours or until cooked through.
Serve with spinach or French beans.
If serving cold, garnish with parsley sprigs.
If serving hot, garnish with parsley and thin slices of lemon.

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.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Lamb + parsleytop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,322 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Lamb + lemontop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,127 recipes

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

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 through by gentle boiling until tender.
Coarse sea salt: Seasons the lamb and water during the soak and boil.

“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.