Name: Mutton Tea
Ingredients: 1 pound good mutton, trimmed of fat; 1½ pints boiling water; 1 ounce clean pearl barley (optional)

Why it works: Mutton and barley work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 510 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

Mutton Tea

Ingredients

1 pound good mutton, trimmed of fat
1½ pints boiling water
1 ounce clean pearl barley (optional)

Directions

Prepare

Cut the mutton into thin slices.
Pour boiling water over the mutton.
Boil for 30 minutes before straining.

Add barley and finish

If using barley, wash and macerate it in boiling water for 1 hour.
Boil the macerated barley with the mutton tea, then strain to separate undissolved barley.

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.

Mutton + barleytop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together510 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton: Provides the meat flavour and savour that the broth is built on.
Pearl barley: Adds body and thickens the broth slightly as its starch releases during boiling.

“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.