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Mutton, Neck Of, Boiled

A boiled neck of mutton cooked with turnips and carrots, served plain or with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Mutton, Neck Of, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mutton

  1. Shorten the ribs and saw off the chine bone of the neck of mutton, keeping it under 5 inches in length.

  2. Trim excess fat from the meat.

Boil

  1. Boil the mutton slowly in plenty of water with a little coarse sea salt.

  2. Skim the surface to remove fat.

  3. Boil the turnips and carrots with the mutton.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat plain or with caper or parsley sauce, garnished with boiled mashed turnips and carrots cut into thin strips.

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

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

  3. Mutton + turniptop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,558 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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 main meat, whose connective tissue softens into tender meat during slow boiling.
Turnips
Boiled until soft, then mashed as a mild, sweet vegetable garnish.
Carrots
Boiled until tender, then cut into thin strips for sweetness and colour.

The step that matters

Boil the mutton slowly. Gentle simmering keeps the meat from toughening and falling apart. A hard rolling boil tightens the muscle fibres and can make the broth cloudy, so the meat is more likely to turn out dry and stringy.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Turnipthe original
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Parsnipfits about as well
  4. Potatofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, carrot. 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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