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To Boil a Leg of Mutton

A boiled leg of mutton cooked with rice flour and suet, optionally flavored with garlic, herbs, onions, and parsley, served with caper sauce and vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

To Boil a Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the leg of mutton in tepid milk and water for several hours.

  2. Wash the mutton well and place it in fresh tepid milk and water.

Cook

  1. Add rice flour and minced mutton suet.

  2. Bring to a quick simmer and skim off any foam.

  3. Cook for 30 minutes per pound, skimming as needed.

  4. Optionally add garlic, sweet herbs, onions, and parsley.

Serve

  1. Serve with caper sauce over mashed turnips, endive, spinach, or sorrel.

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. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Forms the main body of the dish and gives its rich, meaty flavour as it cooks.
Rice flour
Thickens the cooking liquor so it becomes a lightly bodied broth.
Mutton suet
Adds fat that carries flavour and keeps the meat moist during long simmering.

The step that matters

Skimming the foam. Foam that rises at the simmer contains coagulated proteins and impurities. Skimming it keeps the broth clear and stops off flavours from spreading back into the meat.

Swap the garlic

The recipe marks garlic as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, rice, flour, onion, parsley, sauce, turnip):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Celeryfits about as well
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, rice, flour, onion, parsley, sauce, 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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