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Mutton with Caper Sauce

A dish of mutton simmered in its own gravy with a butter and caper sauce, finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mutton with Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mutton

  1. Turn the mutton out of the tin.

  2. Remove the jelly and gravy.

  3. Place the jelly and gravy in a saucepan with the gravina.

  4. Return the meat to the tin.

  5. Stand it in boiling water to heat.

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the gravy.

  2. Melt the butter.

  3. Add the capers to the butter.

  4. Add a squeeze of lemon.

Serve

  1. Turn the meat out of the tin.

  2. Pour the gravy over the meat.

  3. Pour the caper sauce over the meat.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Capers + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Capers + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Capers + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 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

Mutton
Provides the main body of the dish, cooked and served warm in its own gravy.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky texture to the caper sauce.
Capers
Add a sharp, salty bite that contrasts with the rich butter.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery sauce and balances the richness.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, butter, pepper, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, butter, pepper, lemon. 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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