Name: Roast Leg of Mutton
Ingredients: 1 leg of mutton; coarse sea salt; flour for dredging; 1½ cups water

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

1 leg of mutton
coarse sea salt
flour for dredging
1½ cups water

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

Hang the mutton in a cool place until tender, ensuring it does not rust or taint.
Remove the outer skin from the leg of mutton.

Boil

Place the mutton in a pot of boiling water with salt and cook for 1 hour.

Roast

Transfer the mutton to a roasting pan, dredge with flour, and add 1½ cups of water to the pan.
Roast in a 400°F oven for 1 hour, basting every 10 minutes with the cooking liquid.

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 + 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

Leg of mutton: Provides the main meat, whose long hanging and slow cooking make it tender.
Flour: Dredging helps form a browned crust on the outside of the meat.

“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.