Name: Neck of Mutton, Roasted
Ingredients: 1 neck of mutton; butter; coarse sea salt; flour; gravy

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Neck of Mutton, Roasted

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

Remove the chine bone.
Trim the meat from the tops of the ribs, chopping off about 1 inch of the bones.
Skewer the meat on a spit.
Butter the meat and salt the meat.

Roast

Cover the meat with two sheets of paper and tie the paper securely to the spit.
Roast for nearly 1 hour.
Cut off the paper.
Baste the meat with butter.
Sprinkle the meat with flour and salt.

Serve

Place gravy on the dish first, then add the mutton to the gravy.

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.

Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Mutton + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,781 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Mutton + flourtop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,695 recipes

Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton neck: Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and juicy during slow roasting.
Butter: Adds richness and helps the surface brown while basting.
Flour: Sprinkled on the meat to help form a browned, slightly crisp crust.
Gravy: Serves as the base sauce that the roasted meat is set into.

“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.