Name: To Serve with a Boiled Leg of Mutton
Ingredients: mushrooms (Agaricus campestris preferred); flour; butter or oil; coarse sea salt; black pepper; ½ pint good stock

Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

To Serve with a Boiled Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

Wash the mushrooms and dry them.
Dip each mushroom in flour, avoiding excess on the gill side.

Brown and simmer

In a saucepan, heat a little butter or oil.
Place the mushrooms skin side down and dust lightly with salt and pepper.
Brown the mushrooms on this side, then turn and brown the gills.
Add ½ pint of good stock and let simmer gently for 15 minutes.

Finish and serve

Remove the mushrooms with a skimmer and arrange them on a platter around the mutton.
Boil the sauce down to the proper consistency, pour it over the mushrooms, and serve immediately.

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.

Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,253 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together50,459 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Mushrooms: Provide the main body and earthy flavour of the sauce and the dish's centrepiece.
Flour: Coats the mushrooms so they brown evenly and helps thicken the sauce.
Butter or oil: Conducts heat for browning the mushrooms and adds richness to the sauce.
Stock: Forms the liquid base of the sauce, carrying flavour from the mushrooms.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce down to the proper consistency. Reducing the stock concentrates its flavour and thickens it. Boiling too little leaves the sauce thin and watery, while over-reducing makes it salty and overly thick.

“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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To Serve with a Boiled Leg of Mutton