Skip to main content
Main

Mutton Soup

A hearty soup made by boiling a leg of mutton, seasoning, and adding a beaten egg, milk, and flour batter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Mutton Soup

Why it works: Summer savory and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 263 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Mutton Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Boil the leg of mutton for three hours.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper to taste.

  3. Add 1 teaspoon of summer savory.

Add the dumplings

  1. In a bowl, beat together 1 egg, 2 tablespoons of milk, and 2 tablespoons of flour.

  2. Drop spoonfuls of the batter into the soup and boil for three minutes.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Summer savory + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together263 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + summer savorytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together671 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 meat and rich flavour that the broth is built on.
Egg
Binds the batter so the spoonfuls hold together in the soup.
Flour
Thickens the batter and gives the dumplings body as they cook.
Milk
Moistens the batter so it is soft enough to drop from a spoon.

The step that matters

Drop spoonfuls of the batter into the soup and boil for three minutes.. The batter must be spooned into gently simmering liquid so the dumplings set on contact instead of dissolving. Boiling for the full three minutes cooks the flour through, so the dumplings are firm and not raw in the centre.

Swap the summer savory

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, pepper, egg, milk, flour):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Turmericfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Summer savorythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, pepper, egg, milk, flour. 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.

More mutton soup recipes

with Tapioca 10White 8Oyster 4 See all 77 →

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipesCurried MuttonCurried Mutton9 recipesBeef, Mutton, or Veal BrothBeef, Mutton, or Veal Broth6 recipes