Name: Dinner
Ingredients: 8 oz. undressed neck of mutton; 1 pint broth; ¼ cup barley

Why it works: Mutton and barley work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 510 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

Dinner

Ingredients

8 oz. undressed neck of mutton
1 pint broth
¼ cup barley

Directions

Weigh the neck of mutton with the bone before cooking.
Cook the mutton in 1 pint of broth until tender.
Add ¼ cup of barley to the broth and simmer until cooked.

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 + barleytop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together510 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton neck: Provides the main meat and rich flavour as it cooks slowly in the broth.
Barley: Thickens the broth slightly as its starch softens during simmering.

“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.