Skip to main content
Main

Haricot Mutton

A stew of mutton and haricot beans with vegetables, simmered in a sauce of dripping and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Haricot Mutton

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 ↓

Haricot Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stew base

  1. Melt the dripping in a pot and fry the onion until golden brown.

  2. Add the water, seasoning, and chopped vegetables, then simmer for 1 hour.

Cook the mutton

  1. Remove the chine bone from the mutton and cut it into chops, trimming off most of the fat.

  2. Fry the chops until golden brown, then drain and add them to the hot sauce.

  3. Cook gently for 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the chops neatly with the vegetables in the center and gravy poured over.

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.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + beanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Best-end neck of mutton
Provides the meat and fat that flavor the stew as it cooks.
Onion
Browning in the dripping builds sweet, savory flavor for the sauce.
Dripping
Fat for frying that carries flavor and helps the onion and chops brown.
Haricot beans
Starchy beans that soften during simmering and thicken the stew slightly.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks with the liquid.

The step that matters

Fry the chops until golden brown. Browning the meat before adding liquid develops deeper, roasted flavor through the Maillard reaction. Pale chops produce a flatter-tasting gravy, and frying too many at once steams them instead of browning them.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesMutton SoupMutton Soup56 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipes