Skip to main content
Main

Dinner of Mutton or Pig's Cheek

A dinner featuring mutton or pig's cheek served with vegetables, milk‑pudding, baked apple, custard, and a spirit‑water drink.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mutton and spirit work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and 28 recipes mention both. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

  1. Choose 4 ounces of roast or boiled mutton, a mutton chop, or a slice of pig's cheek or calf's head for your main dish.

  2. Serve with a spoonful of well-cooked vegetable such as mashed spinach, French beans, cauliflower, or vegetable marrow.

  3. For dessert, enjoy a few spoonfuls of plain milk-pudding seasoned with cloves or cinnamon, or a baked apple with custard.

  4. Drink a mixture of a dessert-to-table-spoonful of old spirit in a claret-glassful of water towards the end of the meal.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Mutton + spirittop 16% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together28 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Milk + appletop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Apple + spirittop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together27 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  4. Mutton + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together814 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Mutton + spinachtop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together177 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, milk, apple, spirit):

  1. Potatobetter flavor fit
  2. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  3. Tomatobetter flavor fit
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, milk, apple, spirit. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

You might also like

Illustration of Mutton BrothIllustrationMutton Broth292 recipesIllustration of Haricot MuttonIllustrationHaricot Mutton59 recipesIllustration of Mutton SoupIllustrationMutton Soup56 recipesIllustration of Spinach SoupIllustrationSpinach Soup50 recipes