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Roast Mutton, Breton Style

Roast mutton served with beans and onions, seasoned with garlic and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Roast Mutton, Breton Style

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Push a clove of garlic into the knuckle end of the leg of mutton.

  3. Soak the red beans in water for several hours, then drain.

  4. Boil the beans in fresh water until tender, then drain again.

Roast and serve

  1. Place the mutton in the oven and roast for the desired time.

  2. One hour before the mutton is done, add the drained beans to the pan with the meat.

  3. Alternatively, fry the drained beans in dripping with chopped onion until lightly browned, then serve around the mutton.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + beanstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,935 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Clove + beanstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together908 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  5. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of mutton
Is the main cut of meat and provides the dish's rich, savoury flavour and body.
Red beans
Provide starch and body, absorbing meat juices and adding a hearty texture to the dish.
Dripping
Adds fat for frying, carrying flavour and helping the beans and onion brown lightly.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma when fried with the beans.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that infuses the meat as it roasts.

The step that matters

Adding the beans to the roasting pan. Beans must be fully soaked, drained and boiled until tender before they go in, because raw or undercooked beans stay firm and do not soften in the time left while the meat finishes roasting.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, garlic, beans, onion):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, garlic, beans, onion. 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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