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Minced Mutton

A savory sauce of butter, onions, herbs, and flour served over minced mutton topped with poached eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,843 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Minced Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, melt the butter and fry the chopped onions, parsley, and sweet herbs until soft.

  2. Mix the flour with water or stock to form a paste, then add it to the pan.

  3. Pour in additional stock as needed to achieve desired consistency.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the minced mutton to the sauce and warm through without boiling.

  2. Serve topped with poached eggs.

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. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Butter and flour 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

Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce that coats the mutton.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it fries, building a savoury base for the sauce.
Cold boiled or roast mutton
Provides the main meat, which is gently reheated in the sauce.
Butter
Carries the frying of the onion and herbs, adding richness and flavour.

The step that matters

Warm the mutton without boiling. Boiling toughens the proteins in meat that is already cooked, making it dry and stringy, and can cause the flour-thickened sauce to break or become lumpy. Gentle heat keeps the meat tender and the sauce smooth.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, flour, mutton, egg. 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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