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Roast Shoulder of Mutton

Roast shoulder of mutton seasoned with dried flour and coarse sea salt, cooked over a fire and served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Mutton and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,695 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells grass, green. The science ↓

Roast Shoulder of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the vein from the underside of the shoulder.

Roast

  1. Roast the mutton in front of a good fire, allowing 16 minutes per pound.

  2. Baste constantly while cooking.

  3. Half an hour before serving, dredge the mutton with dried flour and sprinkle with salt.

  4. Pour off excess fat and add boiling water to the drippings.

Serve

  1. Serve the mutton on a very hot dish.

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. Mutton + flourtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton shoulder
Is the main cut of meat, cooked slowly so its fat renders and the meat becomes tender.
Dried flour
Coats the outside so it browns and forms a crust that helps thicken the drippings.
Boiling water
Added to the drippings to loosen the browned residue and make a simple gravy.

The step that matters

Dredge with flour and salt half an hour before serving. Flour applied too early can burn or absorb fat unevenly, while applying it too late leaves no time to brown into a crust. Timing it near the end of roasting lets the coating set and brown properly.

“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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