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Mutton Harico

A mutton stew with herbs, spices, carrots, turnips, onions, and celery, simmered slowly in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Mutton Harico

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stew

  1. Fry the mutton chops until brown.

  2. Place them in a stew pan with sweet herbs, cloves, mace, pepper, and salt.

  3. Cover with boiling water and stew slowly for about 1 hour.

Add the vegetables and finish

  1. Add diced carrots, turnips, sliced onions, and chopped celery to the stew pan.

  2. Cover closely, skimming off fat as needed, and stew gently for 1 hour longer.

  3. Serve in a deep dish with gravy.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the meat and rich flavour that the stew is built around.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stew as they soften during long cooking.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and soft texture after the long, slow stew.
Onions
Add savoury depth and sweetness as they break down into the broth.
Celery
Adds a fresh, aromatic background note to the stew.

The step that matters

Skimming off fat. Fat rendered from the mutton floats on the liquid and can make the gravy greasy and heavy. Skimming it during the covered, gentle stew keeps the gravy clean-tasting.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

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