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Irish Stew Soup

A hearty stew of mutton and potatoes simmered in water with pepper and optional herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and winter savory match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 780 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Irish Stew Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the mutton into pieces.

  2. Fry the mutton and season with pepper.

Make the stew

  1. Add 2 quarts of water and boil gently.

  2. Peel, wash, and slice the potatoes, then add them to the soup.

  3. Boil until the mixture forms a puree.

  4. Serve with optional herbs for variation.

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. Thyme + winter savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together780 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Parsley + winter savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together863 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 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
Provides the main meat and savory flavor as it browns and releases juices into the broth.
Potatoes
Break down as they cook, thickening the broth into a puree-like consistency.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture forms a puree. Potatoes thicken the liquid as their starch leaches out and their cells break down. Boiling too hard or too briefly can leave the stew thin or the potatoes unevenly cooked.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, pepper, potato, thyme, winter savory):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Rosemaryfits about as well
  4. Sagefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, pepper, potato, thyme, winter savory. 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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