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
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.
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.
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Mutton + barleytop 14% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Neck of mutton
- Provides the main meat, and the bone adds flavour and body to the broth as it cooks.
- Barley
- Absorbs liquid and swells as it simmers, thickening the broth and giving the stew a chewy texture.
The step that matters
Simmering the barley until cooked. Barley needs a long, gentle simmer in the broth to soften fully. Stopping early leaves it firm, while boiling hard can break the grains and make the stew cloudy and gluey.
“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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