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Cottage Roasting

A large roast of mutton and pork cooked in an oven with a fat pan and flour-salt coating.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Mutton and pork are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,239 recipes. Both carry 1-nonanal, which smells fatty, waxy. The science ↓

Cottage Roasting

Ingredients

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 and roast

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Roast the 4 pounds of mutton for 1 hour and 15 minutes, basting well.

  3. Roast the 6 pounds of breast for 1 hour, 12 inches from the fire.

  4. Roast the 6 pounds of shoulder or neck for the same time.

  5. Roast the 8 pounds of leg for 1 hour and 30 minutes, 18 inches from the fire.

  6. Roast the 10 pounds of saddle for 1 hour and 15 to 1 hour and 30 minutes, 18 inches from the fire.

  7. Place a dripping pan under the meat with a little hot fat.

Make the gravy

  1. A quarter of an hour before serving, add ½ pint of water to the fat in the pan and dredge the meat with flour and salt.

  2. Strain the pan contents into a basin, remove the fat, and add coloring and salt to the gravy before serving.

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 + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,239 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

  2. Pork + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

Pork and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,187 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Forms the main meat, which browns and becomes tender as it roasts.
Flour
Dredged over the meat to help thicken the pan juices into gravy.
Dripping or fat
Carries heat around the meat and enriches the pan drippings for the gravy.

“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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