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Boiled Mutton or Lamb

A boiled mutton or lamb dish with a simple gravy made from flour, vinegar, pepper, salt, and parsley or capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Boiled Mutton or Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Wipe the mutton or lamb and remove the fat.

  2. Place the meat in well salted boiling water, bone side up.

Cook the meat

  1. Boil for 10 minutes.

  2. Simmer for 12 minutes for each pound of meat.

Make the gravy

  1. For the gravy, add 1 tablespoon of flour to each pint of the boiling water used to cook the meat.

  2. Moisten the flour with a little cold water.

  3. Add 1 tablespoon of vinegar, ¼ teaspoon of black pepper, and 1 saltspoon of salt.

  4. Boil for 5 minutes, stirring until smooth.

  5. Add 2 tablespoons of finely chopped parsley or capers.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  4. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Vinegar + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,477 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

Mutton or lamb
Is the main cooked meat, becoming tender and flavourful during long simmering.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth gravy as its starch swells with heat.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, fatty flavour of the gravy.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the gravy. Flour added to hot liquid can clump; moistening it with cold water first and stirring while boiling helps the starch disperse evenly and thicken smoothly.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, flour, vinegar, pepper):

  1. Turmericfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, flour, vinegar, pepper. 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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