Name: To Roast Mutton
Ingredients: 1 leg of mutton; ½ cup hot water; Pepper to taste; Coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Mutton and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,442 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Roast Mutton

Ingredients

1 leg of mutton
½ cup hot water
Pepper to taste
Coarse sea salt to taste

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Place the leg of mutton in a roasting pan.
Add hot water to the pan and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Roast and finish

Roast the mutton, basting it with its own drippings periodically.
For gravy, use the same method as for beef.
If roasting the loin, remove the fat around the kidney to prevent excess oil.

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.

Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,442 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of mutton: Forms the main body of the roast and provides the rich meaty flavor.
Hot water: Adds moisture to the pan so the drippings can form and the meat stays from drying.