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Boiled Mutton with Caper Sauce

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Capers and sauce work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 678 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Boiled Mutton with Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place the mutton in a pot with plenty of salted water.

  2. Cook for 12 minutes per pound.

  3. Remove the mutton and wipe it carefully with a hot, wet cloth.

  4. Butter the mutton all over.

  5. Serve with caper sauce made by adding capers to drawn butter 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. Capers + saucetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together678 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mutton + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Mutton + saucetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,087 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (soapy, waxy).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

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