Name: To Salt a Leg of Mutton
Ingredients: 1 leg of mutton; coarse sea salt; beef pickle

Why it works: Mutton and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,373 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Salt a Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

1 leg of mutton
coarse sea salt
beef pickle

Directions

Cure

Rub the leg of mutton well with coarse sea salt.
The next day, wipe it dry.
Put it into beef pickle for 6 to 7 days.

Cook and serve

When ready, boil the mutton plain.
Serve with mashed turnips, broccoli, or greens.

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 + beeftop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,373 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: Main cut of meat that is salted, pickled, and then boiled.
Coarse sea salt: Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it during curing.
Beef pickle: Brine that seasons the meat and cures it during the soaking period.

“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.