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Boiled Leg of Lamb

A leg of lamb boiled with flour and salt, served with butter or parsley sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lamb and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,402 recipes. Both carry acetaldehyde, which smells pungent, ethereal. The science ↓

Boiled Leg of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim off all loose fat and cut off the shank.

  2. Wash and dry the leg of lamb.

  3. Dredge the lamb with flour and tie it in a clean cloth.

Boil

  1. Place it in boiling water enough to cover it.

  2. Add 2 teaspoons of salt for every quart of water.

  3. Boil for 2 to 3 hours, depending on size.

Serve

  1. Serve with drawn butter or rich parsley sauce and seasonal vegetables.

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 + flourtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of lamb
Forms the main body of the dish and supplies the meat that becomes tender during long simmering.
Flour
Dusted on the surface, it helps thicken the cooking liquid and gives the outside a slightly softer coating.

The step that matters

Keeping the lamb fully covered in boiling water. If the meat is not fully submerged, the exposed part cooks unevenly and can dry out. Keeping the water at a steady boil and the joint covered helps the lamb cook evenly over the long cooking time.

“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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