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Boiled Leg of Mutton

A boiled leg of mutton cooked with salt, pepper, turnips, carrots, and optional onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place the leg of mutton in a pot of boiling water, ensuring it is fully covered.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of coarse sea salt and 1 large teaspoon of black pepper for each gallon of water.

  3. Add turnips and carrots to the pot.

  4. Boil rapidly for 10 minutes.

  5. Skim the surface.

  6. Move the pot to a cooler part of the stove.

  7. Maintain a gentle boil.

  8. Cook for 15 minutes per pound of meat; adjust time for larger legs.

  9. Add onions to the pot.

  10. Serve them mashed with the turnips or whole.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + turniptop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton leg
Forms the main body of the dish; cooking slowly over time makes the meat tender.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the cooking water and penetrates the meat, flavouring it throughout.
Black pepper
Adds a sharp, aromatic spiciness that flavours the cooking liquid and meat.

The step that matters

Maintain a gentle boil. Rapid boiling toughens meat proteins and can break the surface of the meat unevenly, so after the initial boil the pot should be kept at a gentle simmer for even, tender cooking.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, meat, pepper, turnip, carrot):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, meat, pepper, turnip, carrot. 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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