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Roast Mutton Ham

A roast mutton joint stuffed with bacon, onion, garlic, and seasonings, then sewn and cooked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Roast Mutton Ham

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. With a sharp knife, carefully cut the skin to turn it back.

  2. Remove all the meat and grind it with bacon, onion, and garlic.

Stuff and seal

  1. Season the mixture with red and black pepper, salt, and sage if preferred.

  2. Mix thoroughly and stuff the meat back into the joint, pulling the skin over.

  3. Sew the skin closed with coarse thread.

Roast

  1. Cook as an ordinary roast, basting frequently.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Clove + sagetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together731 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Garlic + sagetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton joint
Forms the main body of the roast and supplies most of the meat.
Bacon
Adds fat that keeps the ground filling moist and flavourful.
Onion
Adds moisture and savoury sweetness to the ground filling.
Garlic clove
Adds aromatic flavour to the ground filling.

The step that matters

Sew the skin closed with coarse thread. If the skin is not sewn tightly, the stuffing can leak out and dry or uneven cooking may follow. Good closure keeps the filling enclosed and moist during roasting.

Swap the sage

The recipe marks sage as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, onion, garlic, clove, pepper):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion, garlic, clove, 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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