Skip to main content
Main

Garlic Mutton Roast

A roasted mutton leg flavored with garlic, tomato, green pepper, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tomato and garlic are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,076 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Garlic Mutton Roast

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Clean the mutton and remove the suet.

  2. Pour boiling vinegar and water over the meat and dress it with garlic cloves.

Steam and roast

  1. Place the meat in a pot and scald it with hot lard.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt, then add the tomato and green pepper.

  3. Steam covered until the meat begins to soften.

  4. Remove the cover and place the pot in the oven at 350°F (175°C).

  5. Sprinkle with water continually, adding a little each time until the meat slowly roasts to a red color.

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. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  4. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

  5. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the main meat, which softens with steaming and roasts slowly in the oven.
Lard
Adds fat that coats the meat and helps it brown as it roasts.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that helps tenderize the meat and brighten its flavor.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that infuses the meat during steaming and roasting.

The step that matters

Sprinkling with water while roasting. Adding water in small amounts keeps the surface from drying and scorching while the meat roasts slowly. Too much water at once cools the pot and slows browning, so the meat may stew rather than take on a red roasted color.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, tomato, garlic, pepper, vinegar):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Corianderfits better
  3. Basilfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, tomato, garlic, pepper, vinegar. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipes