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Cutlets a LA Irish Stew

Cutlets simmered in Irish stew with onions, herbs, and potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Cutlets a LA Irish Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chops

  1. Remove the under bone from the neck of mutton and cut it into chops.

  2. Season the chops with pepper, coarse sea salt, mushroom powder, and beaten mace.

Stew

  1. Place the chops in a large saucepan and add the sliced onion, parsley, thyme, and veal broth.

  2. Simmer the chops until they are three-quarters cooked.

  3. Add the peeled whole potatoes and continue to stew until everything is cooked through.

Serve

  1. Remove the parsley and thyme before serving in a deep dish.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Mushroom + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 meat that becomes tender and flavorful during slow simmering.
Veal broth
Supplies the liquid that cooks the chops and carries flavor through the stew.
Whole potatoes
Add starch that thickens the stew slightly and absorbs its savory liquid.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth as it cooks.

The step that matters

Simmer the chops until three-quarters cooked. Gentle simmering breaks down the connective tissue in mutton slowly, making it tender. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can leave it dry, so the heat must stay low and steady.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, pepper, mushroom, onion, parsley, thyme, veal):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, pepper, mushroom, onion, parsley, thyme, veal. 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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