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Haricot of Mutton

A mutton stew made with neck fat, turnips, onion, pepper, salt, ketchup, and hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Haricot of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mutton

  1. Cut the fat from the neck of mutton into thin steaks.

  2. Heat the fat in a frying pan and lightly brown the steaks.

  3. Place the browned steaks in a dish.

Fry the vegetables

  1. Fry the turnips and sliced onion in the same pan.

Stew and serve

  1. Layer the steaks at the bottom of a stewpan, add the vegetables on top.

  2. Cover with hot water and bring to a boil.

  3. Skim off any foam, then reduce heat and simmer gently until tender.

  4. Remove excess fat, then add pepper, salt, and ketchup.

  5. Serve hot.

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. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Turnip + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,252 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton neck
Provides the meat and fat that flavour the stew as they render and simmer until tender.
Turnips
Soften during simmering and add mild sweetness and body to the broth.
Onion
Frying softens its sugars and adds savoury depth to the stew base.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity that rounds out the savoury stew flavour.

The step that matters

Skim off any foam, then simmer gently until tender. Foam from the boiling water contains impurities that can cloud and taint the broth. Gentle simmering keeps the meat tender without toughening its proteins, which vigorous boiling would do.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, flour, turnip, pepper, ketchup. 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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