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Stewed Leg of Mutton

A slow‑cooked mutton leg with carrots, onions, turnips, tomatoes, and marjoram in a savory broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Stewed Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the mutton

  1. Place the leg of mutton in a pot with water or gravy.

  2. Add slices of carrots and a little coarse sea salt.

  3. Stew slowly for 3 hours.

Add the vegetables and finish

  1. Add small onions, small turnips, tomatoes or tomato ketchup, and sweet marjoram.

  2. Let it stew for an additional 3 hours.

  3. Ensure the meat is tender but not overcooked.

  4. Serve with the vegetables and gravy, and mashed potatoes on the side.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together687 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Turnip + marjoramtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together367 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 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

Leg of mutton
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow stewing.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stewing liquid as they soften.
Small onions
Soften during stewing and add savoury depth to the gravy.
Small turnips
Soften in the stew and contribute a mild, slightly sweet flavour.
Tomatoes or tomato ketchup
Add acidity and savoury tang that brightens the rich, fatty broth.

The step that matters

Ensure the meat is tender but not overcooked. Collagen in mutton breaks down into gelatin over long, gentle simmering, which makes the meat tender. If it stews too hard or too long, the muscle fibres dry out and become stringy, so the meat should be checked as it approaches tenderness.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, carrot, onion, turnip, marjoram. 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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