Name: Boiled Mutton
Ingredients: mutton; ½ tablespoon coarse sea salt; 4 cups boiling water; 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 ↓

Boiled Mutton

Ingredients

mutton
½ tablespoon coarse sea salt
4 cups boiling water
1 cup cooking liquid from the pot
2 tablespoons capers or chopped green pickle

Directions

Place the mutton in a pot and cover it with boiling water.
Add the salt and cook for 12 minutes per pound.
Remove the mutton and set it aside.
For the sauce, take 1 cup of the cooking liquid from the pot. Prepare the sauce like drawn butter, adding capers or chopped green pickle if desired.

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

Mutton: Is the main cut that is cooked gently in simmering water until tender.
Cooking liquid from the pot: Carries meat flavour into the sauce, giving it savoury depth.

“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.