Skip to main content
Main

Breast of Mutton

A mutton breast prepared by roasting, boiling, or grilling, served with cucumbers, parsley, caper sauce, walnuts, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 380 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Breast of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and roast

  1. Trim excess fat from the breast of mutton.

  2. Roast the meat.

  3. Serve with stewed cucumbers or cold with chopped parsley.

Boil and grill

  1. Partially boil the meat.

  2. Grill it, covering with bread crumbs and herbs.

  3. Serve with caper sauce.

Finish

  1. If boned, remove more fat.

  2. Cover with bread and seasoning, then roll.

  3. Boil.

  4. Serve with chopped walnuts or capers and butter.

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. Cucumber + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together380 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Parsley + walnuttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together865 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + cucumbertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Mutton + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Breast of mutton
Forms the main body of the dish and carries the flavour of the meat.
Bread crumbs
Form a crust that browns and crisps when grilled.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, keeping the serving moist and flavourful.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, parsley, bread, sauce, walnut, butter):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, parsley, bread, sauce, walnut, butter. 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.

More mutton breast recipes

Stuffed 9Boiled 7Collared 6Grilled 6Roasted 6Roast 5 See all 4 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes