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To Roast Mutton

A roasted leg of mutton served with currant jelly and mashed turnips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and chestnut share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 46 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Roast Mutton

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

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Trim off any inedible parts of the mutton and wash the meat well.

  3. Remove the skin and sew it onto the meat, or tie soaked paper over the fat to prevent burning.

Roast

  1. Add a little coarse sea salt and water to the dripping pan to baste the meat initially, then use its own gravy.

  2. Roast a leg of mutton for 2 to 2.5 hours, depending on its size.

  3. A quarter of an hour before it's done, remove the skin or paper and lightly dredge the meat with flour, then baste with butter.

Serve

  1. Skim the gravy and serve it in a boat.

  2. Serve with currant jelly and mashed turnips.

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 + chestnuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + chestnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together517 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Currant + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together356 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Mutton
Lean meat that becomes tender and juicy during slow roasting, forming the dish's main body.
Flour
Dredged on the surface near the end, it helps the exterior brown and form a crisp crust.
Butter
Basted over the surface, it adds fat that promotes browning and a richer flavor.
Currant jelly
Its sweetness and acidity offset the richness of the roasted meat.

The step that matters

Remove the skin or paper a quarter hour before the end. Protecting the fat prevents burning early on, but leaving the covering on too long stops the surface from browning. Removing it near the end lets flour and butter form a golden crust.

Swap the chestnut

The recipe marks chestnut as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, flour, butter, currant, turnip, oyster, port wine):

  1. Chestnutthe original
  2. Peasfits about as well
  3. Almondfits about as well
  4. Walnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, flour, butter, currant, turnip, oyster, port wine. 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 roasted mutton recipes

Shoulder 24Loin 20Saddle 13Leg 9Neck 7Breast 6 See all 20 →

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