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Hash Mutton

Hash Mutton is a stew of sliced cold mutton cooked with onion, pepper, toasted bread, and walnut ketchup, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Hash Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the cold mutton into uniform slices.

  2. Flour the slices and season with salt and pepper.

Make the gravy

  1. In a stewpan, combine the onion, whole pepper, toasted bread, and water to make gravy.

  2. Add a little walnut ketchup to the gravy and stew for 2 hours before using.

Finish and serve

  1. Do not let the hash boil; when done, thicken with butter, flour, and water if needed.

  2. Serve with slices of toasted bread.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mutton + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Cold mutton
Provides the main meat, which is cut into even slices so it heats through evenly.
Flour
Coats the meat and thickens the gravy, giving body to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and smooths the gravy when it is used to finish the thickening.
Walnut ketchup
Adds a concentrated savoury, slightly sharp flavour to the gravy.

The step that matters

Do not let the hash boil. Boiling a hash toughens the meat proteins and can break the thickened gravy, so keep it below a boil and thicken gently.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, flour, pepper, onion, bread, ketchup, butter):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Peasfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, flour, pepper, onion, bread, ketchup, butter. 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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