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Boiled Leg of Mutton

A leg of mutton boiled with turnip, parsley, and capers, served with caper sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 145 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the mutton

  1. Place the mutton in a pot and cover it with boiling water.

  2. Boil for 15 minutes, then reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes per pound.

  3. Slice the turnip into half-inch pieces and add it to the pot 30 minutes before the meat is done.

Serve

  1. Transfer the meat to a hot platter and garnish with turnip, parsley, and capers.

  2. Serve with caper sauce and save the cooking water for soup.

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. Turnip + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mutton + turniptop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,558 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Mutton + parsleytop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,915 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton leg
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and moist through long gentle simmering.
Turnip
Adds a mildly sweet, earthy flavor and firm texture as it cooks in the broth.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the rich flavor of the meat.

The step that matters

Simmering the mutton. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil keeps the meat tender and prevents the muscle fibers from tightening and toughening. Timing the turnip to finish with the meat keeps it from turning mushy.

“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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