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Boiled Leg of Mutton with Oyster Stuffing

A boiled leg of mutton stuffed with oysters, parsley, onion, sweet herbs, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,843 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boiled Leg of Mutton with Oyster Stuffing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Remove the gills and inedible parts from the oysters and parboil them.

  2. Chop the oysters with boiled parsley, onion, and sweet herbs.

  3. Add the yolks of 2-3 hard-boiled eggs to the mixture.

Stuff and cook the leg

  1. Make 5–6 incisions in the leg of mutton and fill them with the stuffing.

  2. Tie the leg in a cloth and boil in plenty of water for 2.5 hours, depending on size.

Serve

  1. Remove the cloth, place the leg on a dish, and serve immediately.

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. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

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

  3. Mutton + oystertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together317 recipes

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

  4. Mutton + oniontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,531 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Oyster + oniontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 dish and carries the stuffing while it cooks.
Oysters
Add a briny, savoury flavour to the stuffing and become tender when parboiled.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Bind the chopped mixture together and add richness to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Tie the leg in a cloth and boil it. Boiling in plenty of water cooks the thick joint gradually and evenly. Too little water or too brief a boil can leave the centre undercooked, while the stuffing needs the meat fully cooked to be safe.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, oyster, parsley, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, oyster, parsley, egg. 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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