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Sliced Mutton with Mushrooms

Thinly sliced mutton cooked with mushrooms, butter, stock, pepper, and sea salt, served over toast or fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Sliced Mutton with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Flour both sides of the sliced mutton.

  2. Cut the mushrooms into four pieces.

Cook

  1. In a pan, melt the butter and add the mushrooms.

  2. Add a little stock, pepper, and coarse sea salt to the mushrooms and stew.

  3. Once the mushrooms are done, add the mutton to the pan.

  4. Heat slowly and stir frequently without boiling.

  5. When the gravy thickens, serve on toast or fried 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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mutton + mushroomtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together685 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

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

Mutton
Provides the meat that gives the dish its main body and savoury flavour.
Flour
Coats the mutton and thickens the gravy as it cooks.
Mushrooms
Release moisture and savoury flavour into the gravy as they stew.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the mushrooms brown and soften.
Stock
Supplies liquid to form the gravy around the meat and mushrooms.

The step that matters

Heat slowly and stir without boiling. Boiling can toughen the meat and cause the flour-thickened gravy to become lumpy or uneven. Gentle heat keeps the mutton tender and lets the gravy thicken smoothly.

“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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