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Ragout of Mutton

A slow-cooked mutton ragout with gravy, walnut catsup, and parsley, served over fried bread sippets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Ragout of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Brown and stew

  1. Fry the mutton in dripping until nicely browned.

  2. Place the browned mutton in a saucepan.

  3. Add the chopped ham to the saucepan.

  4. Cover with gravy and season well.

  5. Stew slowly until very tender.

Make the gravy

  1. Keep the meat hot while you add lemon and walnut catsup to the gravy.

  2. Boil for five minutes.

  3. Strain the gravy and return it to the saucepan.

  4. Thicken the gravy with browned flour and stir in the minced parsley.

  5. Boil again.

Serve

  1. Pour the gravy over the meat in a flat dish.

  2. Arrange fried bread sippets around the edge of the dish.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Walnut + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together865 recipes

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

  5. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Browning and slow stewing make the lean meat tender and flavourful.
Browned flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the meat.
Gravy
Provides the liquid that stews the meat and forms the sauce.
Walnut catsup
Adds a dark, savoury tang to the gravy.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy.

The step that matters

Stew slowly until very tender. Lean mutton has tough connective tissue that only breaks down into tenderness with long, gentle heat. Rushing it with a hard boil leaves the meat stringy and dry.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, flour, pepper, lemon, parsley, ham, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, flour, pepper, lemon, parsley, ham, bread. 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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