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Cold Mutton Re-cooked with Wine

A stew of leftover boiled or roasted mutton re‑cooked with wine, vegetables, and a butter‑flour gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Cold Mutton Re-cooked with Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mutton

  1. Stick the cloves into the mutton and season with pepper and salt.

  2. Place the mutton in a stew-pan with carrots, turnips, onions, parsley, and celery.

Simmer and thicken

  1. Cover with cold water and simmer until the vegetables are tender.

  2. Remove the meat and skim off the fat from the gravy.

  3. Thicken the gravy with butter rolled in flour and boil for 1-2 minutes.

  4. Just before serving, stir in the Madeira wine.

Serve

  1. Pour the gravy over the meat and serve.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the meat that is re-cooked until tender in the gravy.
Butter
Enriches the gravy and, rolled in flour, helps thicken it smoothly.
Flour
Combined with butter to thicken the gravy as it boils.
Madeira wine
Adds acidity and rich aroma to the gravy when stirred in at the end.
Onions
Release sweetness and savory flavor into the simmering gravy.

The step that matters

Skimming the fat from the gravy. Fat rises to the surface as the broth simmers and, if left in, makes the gravy greasy and heavy. Removing it before thickening gives a cleaner, smoother sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, clove, pepper, carrot, turnip, parsley, celery):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, clove, pepper, carrot, turnip, parsley, celery. 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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