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Mutton Haricot

A stew of mutton chops simmered with carrots, onion, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Mutton Haricot

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Trim the mutton chops, leaving the bone.

  2. Brown the chops on both sides in a hot pan with a little butter.

  3. Drop the browned chops into boiling water to cover them.

Add the vegetables

  1. Add the sliced carrots to the pot.

  2. Let the carrots stew until tender.

  3. In the same pan, brown the sliced onion.

  4. Add the browned onion to the pot.

Season

  1. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

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. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton chops
Provide the main meat, with bone and fat adding flavour and body to the stew.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the chops, helping create savoury flavour on the meat surface.
Carrots
Add sweetness and soften during stewing, giving the broth body and flavour.
Onion
Browning adds savoury, aromatic flavour to the stew.

The step that matters

Brown the chops on both sides. Browning triggers the Maillard reaction, creating savoury, deeply flavoured compounds on the meat surface that later flavour the broth. Pale, unbrowned meat yields a flatter stew.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, butter, carrot, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, butter, carrot, 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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