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Leg of Mutton

A leg of mutton cooked by roasting, baking, or boiling, served with various sauces, potatoes, and vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip 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 ↓

Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the mutton

  1. Roast, bake, or boil the leg of mutton.

  2. Cook the carrots and turnips with the meat.

Serve

  1. If roasting, serve with red currant jelly, tomato sauce, mushroom sauce, or piquant sauce, along with potatoes and green vegetables.

  2. For boiled mutton, serve with caper sauce, potatoes, carrots, and turnips.

  3. Mash with pepper, coarse sea salt, and butter, or serve them plainly around the dish.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Tomato + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,798 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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 central meat, whose slow cooking by roasting or boiling makes it tender and juicy.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture when mashed into the potatoes or vegetables.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, tomato, sauce, mushroom, potato, carrot, turnip):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Cherryfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, tomato, sauce, mushroom, potato, carrot, turnip. 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.

More leg of mutton recipes

Boiled 96Roast 55Roasted 55Braised 53Stuffed 47Cold Roast 10 See all 25 →

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