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To Boil a Leg of Veal or Mutton

A leg of veal or mutton is stuffed, sewn, and boiled with bread, salt pork, herbs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Veal and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and 4,919 recipes mention both. Both carry 4-heptenal, which smells creamy, biscuit. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Mix bread, salt pork, sweet herbs, pepper, and salt to make a stuffing.

Stuff and sew the meat

  1. Make deep gashes in the meat or remove the bone and fill the cavity with stuffing.

  2. Sew up the opening with strong thread; if there is a flap of flesh, lap it over and sew it down.

Boil the meat

  1. Place the meat in a large pot and cover with water.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of salt and let it simmer slowly for 3 hours.

  3. If necessary, add boiling water to keep it covered.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Veal + porktop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,919 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  2. Bread + porktop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,342 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Veal + breadtop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,056 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-3-hexenol (green, grassy).

  4. Pork + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together22,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Veal + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together10,049 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

Veal or mutton leg
Is the main meat, which becomes tender and moist as it simmers slowly in water.
Bread
Soaks up juices and keeps the stuffing soft and moist during long cooking.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the stuffing, keeping it from drying out.

The step that matters

Keep the meat covered with simmering liquid. If the meat is exposed to air, the top dries and toughens. Adding boiling water rather than cold keeps the simmer steady and the meat cooking evenly over the long time.

“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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