Skip to main content
Main

Mutton Soup

A hearty soup made with mutton shoulder, turnips, carrots, onions, and optional dumplings, simmered slowly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Mutton Soup

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Mutton Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the meat from the shoulder of mutton.

  2. Place the meat in a soup pot with 2 quarts of water.

  3. Bring the soup to a boil and skim the surface.

Simmer

  1. Reduce the heat and simmer for 1.5 hours.

  2. Add the remaining mutton whole.

  3. Cover with boiling water.

  4. Season with salt.

  5. Skim the surface when the new meat begins to boil.

  6. Skim the surface every 15 minutes.

  7. Simmer slowly for 5 hours.

Add vegetables

  1. Add turnips, carrots, and onions 1.5 hours before serving.

  2. Optionally, add small dumplings.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat in a tureen with the soup and chopped parsley.

  2. Serve the remaining mutton on a separate dish with whole boiled turnips.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + barleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together629 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Rice + barleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together568 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton shoulder
Slow simmering draws collagen out of the meat, giving the broth body and rich flavor.
Onions
Soften and release sweet, savory aromatics into the broth as they cook.
Carrots
Add gentle sweetness and color to the broth as they cook.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and a tender texture after long simmering.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly rather than boil. A hard rolling boil agitates fat and fine meat particles into the broth, making it cloudy and greasy, and it toughens the meat. A gentle simmer keeps the broth clear and the meat tender.

Swap the peas

The recipe marks peas as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, turnip, carrot, onion, parsley, rice, barley):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, turnip, carrot, onion, parsley, rice, barley. 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.

More mutton soup recipes

with Tapioca 10White 8Oyster 4 See all 77 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesGreen PeasGreen Peas229 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipes