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Cold Roast Leg of Mutton

A roast leg of mutton cooked with veal forcemeat filling, simmered with onions, parsley, bay leaves, carrots, and turnips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Cold Roast Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the leg

  1. Trim the large end of the leg to make it flat.

  2. Cut through the joint where it has been carved and remove the bone from the fillet.

  3. Fill the cavity with veal forcemeat.

Simmer

  1. Place the meat, bones, knuckle, and trimmings in a stew pot and cover with water or broth.

  2. Bring to a boil, then add onions, parsley, bay leaves, carrots, and turnips.

  3. Simmer gently for about 2 hours.

  4. Add thickening, spice, or store-sauce to the gravy before serving.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of mutton
Forms the main body of the dish and gives the meat that cooks down into the gravy.
Veal forcemeat
Fills the cavity, adding moisture and a tender, compact texture to the meat.
Onions
Add aroma and sweetness to the broth as they soften during simmering.
Carrots
Contribute natural sweetness and body to the cooking liquid.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and earthy flavour to the gravy as they cook.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for about 2 hours. A gentle simmer keeps the liquid just below a boil, so the meat becomes tender without its proteins tightening and toughening. A rolling boil would make the meat dry and stringy and cloud the gravy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, veal, parsley, carrot, turnip, sauce):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, veal, parsley, carrot, turnip, sauce. 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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