Skip to main content
Main

Stuffed Breast of Mutton

A mutton breast stuffed with meat, spices, and bacon, cooked in broth and served with peas or beans.

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

Why it works: Mutton and meat work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 936 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Stuffed Breast of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the thin skin of the mutton.

  2. Stuff the space between the skin and flesh with your choice of meat.

  3. Add spices, lard with bacon, and pour in broth and herbs.

Cook

  1. You can cook it in a pot or roast it well-larded.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. To make the sauce, mix a little of the cooking juice with flour.

  2. Serve with green peas or beans, or with a ragout-style sauce.

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. Mutton + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together936 recipes

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

  2. Mutton + peastop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together598 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Meat + peastop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together573 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Flour + peastop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,837 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton breast
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow, moist cooking.
Bacon
Adds fat that bastes the lean meat from within, keeping it moist and flavourful.
Broth
Gently cooks the meat in liquid and forms the base for the cooking juices.
Flour
Thickens the cooking juices into a sauce as it is stirred and heated.

The step that matters

Adding flour to the cooking juice. Flour must be mixed with a little cold liquid first, then stirred into hot juices; added dry it clumps and the sauce stays lumpy.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, meat, flour, sauce. 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.

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesGreen PeasGreen Peas229 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipesMutton SoupMutton Soup56 recipes