Name: Mutton Broth
Ingredients: chump end of the loin or scrag end of the neck of mutton; whole pepper; 2 fried onions; turnips; chopped parsley; chopped thyme

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 ↓

Mutton Broth

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the mutton gently for 2 hours or longer until tender, but do not boil it to rags.
Add a few grains of whole pepper, 2 fried onions, and turnips to the pot an hour or two before serving.
Strain the broth from the vegetables and mix in chopped parsley and thyme.
Mash the turnips and serve them in a separate dish.
Serve the broth strong for health, or leave the fat if using as a remedy for a cold.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,057 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,842 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + thymetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,352 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

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

Swap the onion

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

Carrotfits better
Leekfits better
Parsnipfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, pepper, turnip, parsley, thyme. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.