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Boiled Neck of Mutton with Caper Sauce

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip 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 ↓

Boiled Neck of Mutton with Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the neck of mutton until tender.

  2. Prepare carrots and mashed turnips as sides.

  3. Make suet dumplings and cook them in the broth.

  4. Serve the broth first, adding boiled rice or pearl barley with the meat.

  5. Drizzle caper sauce over the mutton before serving.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Turnip + ricetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together824 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mutton + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Mutton + carrottop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,878 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, carrot, sauce, rice):

  1. Turnipthe original
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Leekfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, carrot, sauce, rice. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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