Why it works: Lamb and rice work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 439 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Boiled Leg Op Lamb
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Soak the leg of lamb in warm water for 2 hours.
Boil and serve
Wrap the lamb in a cloth and boil it slowly in hot water for 1.5 hours or until tender.
Add salt to season the broth when the lamb is partly cooked.
If desired, boil ½ cup of rice with the lamb for a nice presentation.
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.
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Lamb + ricetop 10% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together439 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Leg of lamb
- Provides the main meat; slow boiling breaks down its connective tissue so it becomes tender.
The step that matters
Boil slowly. A hard, rapid boil toughens the meat fibres and can leave them dry and stringy. Gentle simmering lets the connective tissue break down into gelatin, which keeps the lamb tender and moist.
“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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