Name: To Roast a Leg of Pork Without the Skin, Called Mock Goose
Ingredients: 1 leg of pork (8 pounds); butter for basting; ½ teaspoon dry sage; ½ teaspoon ground black pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; ¼ cup grated bread; 1 minced onion (optional); ½ pint gravy; goose stuffing (for under the skin)

Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Roast a Leg of Pork Without the Skin, Called Mock Goose

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

Parboil the leg of pork and remove the skin.

Roast

Place the leg in the oven to roast, basting with butter.
When nearly done, mix sage, pepper, salt, and grated bread, and sprinkle over the meat. Optionally, add minced onion to the mixture.

Finish and serve

Pour gravy into the dish and add goose stuffing under the knuckle skin or garnish with fried or boiled stuffing balls.

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.

Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,388 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,214 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Pork + sagetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,527 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of pork: Forms the main body of the roast, providing the meat that is cooked and served.
Butter: Adds fat for basting, helping the surface brown and stay moist during roasting.
Grated bread: Forms a crumb coating on the meat that toasts and adds a light texture to the crust.
Gravy: Adds moisture and savoury flavour to the dish when poured into it for serving.

The step that matters

Adding the sage, pepper, salt and bread mixture. It is added only when the pork is nearly done, because a crumb coating exposed to long heat can scorch before the meat is cooked through.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, butter, sage, pepper, bread):

Capsicumfits better
Potatofits better
Tomatofits about as well
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, butter, sage, pepper, bread. 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.

Brown Bread461 recipes

Pork Cake107 recipes

Roast Pork82 recipes

White Bread80 recipes

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To Roast a Leg of Pork Without the Skin, Called Mock Goose