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Winter Hotch-potch

A hearty stew of dried green peas, mutton or beef, carrots, turnips, celery, onion or leek, parsley, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Winter Hotch-potch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the dried green peas overnight, then boil until tender and pulp through a sieve.

  2. Cut the meat into neat pieces or keep it whole as preferred.

Make the stew

  1. In a stewpan, combine grated carrots, diced turnips, celery, onion or leek, and parsley.

  2. Pour in 4 quarts of water and bring to a gentle boil.

  3. Add the meat, season with pepper and coarse sea salt, and simmer gently for about 2 hours.

  4. Stir in the pulped peas and boil for an additional 15 minutes before serving.

  5. If desired, add finely shredded cabbage to the vegetables.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Dried green peas
Cooked and pulped, they thicken the broth and give the stew its body.
Mutton or beef
Slow simmering makes the meat tender and adds rich savoury flavour to the broth.
Carrots
Add sweetness and colour to the broth as they soften.
Onion or leek
Builds savoury aromatic flavour in the broth.

The step that matters

Simmer the meat gently. A gentle simmer keeps the meat tender and the broth clear; a hard rolling boil toughens the meat fibres and makes the liquid cloudy.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, carrot, turnip, celery, onion, parsley, pepper. 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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