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Mutton Roasted in Browned Butter

A roasted mutton leg with turnips cooked in browned butter and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,874 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Mutton Roasted in Browned Butter

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the turnips

  1. Brown the butter and sugar in a pan.

  2. Add the turnips and turn them a few times.

  3. Pour in the stock or water and add salt.

  4. Sprinkle flour over the turnips and let them boil.

Brown the mutton

  1. In another pan, heat the drippings or butter.

  2. Brown the mutton on all sides.

Roast and serve

  1. Add the turnips to the mutton.

  2. Cover and cook in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 2 hours.

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 + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

What each ingredient does

White turnips
Form the bulk of the dish and soften into a tender, lightly sweet vegetable base.
Sugar
Caramelises with the butter to add sweetness and light browning to the turnips.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid around the turnips into a light sauce.
Mutton leg
Provides the main meat, whose browned surface adds savoury flavour and aroma.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour while browning the sugar and the turnips.

The step that matters

Brown the mutton on all sides. Searing creates browned surface flavour through the Maillard reaction. Crowded or wet meat steams instead of browning, so it needs a hot pan and space.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, flour, mutton, pepper):

  1. Leekfits about as well
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, mutton, pepper. 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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