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Boiled Mutton with Caper Sauce

A boiled leg of mutton served with a caper sauce made from milk, flour, butter, salt, pepper, and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,024 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Mutton with Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mutton

  1. Bring a pot of water to a boil and add a handful of coarse sea salt.

  2. Wash the leg of mutton and rub salt into it.

  3. Add whole black pepper and additional salt to the boiling water.

Cook the mutton

  1. Cook the mutton for 2 hours for rare or 3 hours or longer for well-done, depending on size.

  2. Skim off any scum that rises while boiling the mutton.

Make the caper sauce

  1. In a separate pot, boil the milk.

  2. Thicken the milk with flour blended well, then add butter, salt, pepper, and capers.

Serve

  1. Serve the mutton with caper sauce.

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. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + caperstop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Leg of mutton
Is the main cut of meat, cooked long in water until tender.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, pourable caper sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the finished caper sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the caper sauce once thickened.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the milk with flour blended well. Flour must be fully blended into the milk before or as it heats, otherwise it clumps into lumps instead of thickening the sauce smoothly. Starch gelatinises as the liquid heats, so the mixture should be kept moving to keep it even.

Swap the capers

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

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, milk, flour, butter, 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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