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Boiled Mutton with Caper Sauce

A boiled leg of mutton served with a sauce of capers, butter, flour, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,024 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Mutton with Caper Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Bring a pot of water to a boil and add a handful of salt.

  2. Wash the leg of mutton and rub salt into it.

Cook and make the sauce

  1. Cook the mutton for about 2 hours for rare, or 3 hours or longer for well done, depending on size.

  2. Boil the milk and thicken it with flour blended well.

  3. Add butter, salt, pepper, and capers to the thickened milk.

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 + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Capers + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Leg of mutton
Long gentle boiling breaks down tough connective tissue, leaving the meat tender and moist.
Milk
Forms the base of the sauce, giving it a smooth, creamy body.
Flour
Thickens the boiled milk into a smooth sauce as its starch swells with heat.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Capers
Add a sharp, tangy acidity that cuts through the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Blending the flour into the milk. Flour added directly to hot milk clumps, because its starch grains coat in lumps before they can disperse. Blending the flour smoothly first lets the starch swell evenly as the milk heats, giving a smooth, lump-free sauce.

Swap the capers

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

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, milk, butter, flour, 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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