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To Boil a Leg of Lamb

A lamb leg boiled with vinegar or salt, herbs, and cloth, served with greens and garnished with parsley and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Boil a Leg of Lamb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the leg of lamb in a pot and cover it with clear cold soft water.

  2. Let it soak for 30 minutes.

  3. Add vinegar or salt to the water.

  4. Wrap the lamb in the floured cloth and place it in the pot.

  5. Add the bundle of sweet herbs to the pot.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for 1.5 hours until cooked through.

  2. Serve with spinach or French beans.

  3. If serving cold, garnish with parsley and lemon slices.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Lamb + parsleytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,322 recipes

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

  3. Vinegar + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,477 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Vinegar + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Lamb + lemontop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,127 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of lamb
Forms the main body of the dish, and boiling cooks the meat through to tenderness.
Vinegar or coarse sea salt
Adds acidity or salt to the soaking water, seasoning the meat.

The step that matters

Boil for 1.5 hours until cooked through. Boiling must run long enough for heat to reach the centre of the thick joint, so the meat is fully cooked and tender. Stopping early leaves the centre undercooked, which is unsafe. The cloth keeps the surface protected while the water cooks the meat evenly.

“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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