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To Roast a Leg of Mutton

A roasted leg of mutton seasoned with coarse sea salt and served with onion or currant jelly sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Red wine and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,075 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

To Roast a Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Roast

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Baste the leg of mutton well while roasting for about 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with onion or currant jelly sauce.

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. Red wine + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  2. Mutton + oniontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,531 recipes

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

  3. Mutton + red winetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together117 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of mutton
Is the main cut of meat that is roasted and carved for the dish.
Red wine
Adds moisture and flavour to the pan juices when used for basting.

The step that matters

Basting the leg of mutton. Regular basting keeps the surface moist and helps it brown evenly as the fat renders and the juices reduce in the pan, so the roast does not dry out over about 2 hours in the oven.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, red wine):

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, red wine. 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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