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Harrico Mutton Soup

A hearty soup made with mutton, turnips, carrots, onion, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Harrico Mutton Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Divide the neck of mutton into two parts.

  2. Place the scrag end in a stewpan with turnips, carrots, onion, and water.

  3. Stew gently over low heat for 2 hours until the mutton is tender.

Thicken and finish

  1. Bruise 2 turnips and 1 carrot through a colander to thicken the soup.

  2. Cut the other part of the mutton into chops and brown them in a pan.

  3. Add the chops to the soup and simmer gently until tender.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Carrot + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,796 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton neck
Gives the soup its meaty flavour and rich body as it stews.
Turnips
Bruised turnips break down into the soup, thickening it and adding body.
Carrots
Bruised carrots dissolve into the broth, adding sweetness and thickness.
Flour
Starch thickens the soup as the liquid simmers.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds deep savoury, umami flavour to the broth.

The step that matters

Brown the mutton chops before adding them to the soup. Browning creates Maillard flavour compounds on the surface of the meat, which add depth that simmering alone does not produce. Pale chops give a flatter-tasting soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, turnip, carrot, flour, mushroom, ketchup):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, turnip, carrot, flour, mushroom, ketchup. 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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