Name: Leg of Mutton
Ingredients: 1 leg of mutton; 1 tablespoon coarse sea salt; 1 cup cooking liquid from the pot; 2 tablespoons capers or chopped green pickle

Why it works: Mutton and capers work together. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 199 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

1 leg of mutton
1 tablespoon coarse sea salt
1 cup cooking liquid from the pot
2 tablespoons capers or chopped green pickle

Directions

Cook the mutton

Tie the leg of mutton in a piece of cheesecloth.
Place it in a pot with boiling water, several inches deep.
Add salt and cook for 12 minutes per pound.
Remove the cloth with the meat and place it in very cold water.

Make the sauce

Make the sauce using 1 cup of the cooking liquid.
Add capers or chopped green pickle to the sauce instead of lemon juice.

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.

Mutton + caperstop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together199 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of mutton: Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow simmering in water.
Cooking liquid from the pot: Carries the meat's flavour into the sauce, adding savoury depth and moisture.
Capers or chopped green pickle: Adds sharp acidity and tang to the sauce in place of lemon juice.

“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.