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Leg of Grass-Lamb Boiled

A boiled leg of grass lamb served with capers, carrots, and turnips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and turnip 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 ↓

Leg of Grass-Lamb Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the leg of grass lamb until tender.

  2. Serve with capers, carrots, and turnips.

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. Capers + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Capers + carrottop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together288 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lamb + carrottop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together724 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lamb + turniptop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together276 recipes

    Shared aroma: geraniol (rose, geranium).

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

What each ingredient does

Lamb leg
Is the main protein; boiling until tender breaks down connective tissue for a soft texture.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (grass, lamb, carrot, turnip):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against grass, lamb, carrot, turnip. 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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