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Roast Leg of Mutton

A roasted leg of mutton seasoned with coarse sea salt and flour, cooked over a fire and finished with salted boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Mutton and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,695 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells grass, green. The science ↓

Roast Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Hang the mutton in a cool, airy place for a few days to tenderize.

  2. Wash off the flour from the mutton. Dry the meat thoroughly.

  3. Cut off the shank bone.

Roast

  1. Place the leg of mutton over a brisk, clear fire and dredge with flour.

  2. Baste continuously while cooking for about 2 to 2.5 hours for a 10 lb leg.

  3. About 20 minutes before serving, move the leg closer to the fire to brown.

  4. Sprinkle the leg with coarse sea salt.

Serve

  1. Pour off the drippings.

  2. Add slightly salted boiling water over the joint before serving.

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. Mutton + flourtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Mutton leg
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender with hanging and slow roasting.
Flour
Dredged over the meat, it helps form a crust that browns during roasting.

The step that matters

Move the leg closer to the fire to brown. Browning depends on high surface heat, and timing matters: too early can dry or scorch the outside, while too late leaves the crust pale and unappealing.

“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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