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Hashed Mutton

A stew of cold mutton, vegetables, and gravy served over buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Hashed Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Season the cold mutton pieces with pepper and salt.

  2. Place the bones and trimmings in a saucepan, cover with water, and add sliced onions.

  3. Stew until a good gravy is formed, then skim and strain it into a stew-pan.

Make the hash

  1. Add the mutton to the gravy.

  2. Slice the boiled carrots, turnips, potatoes, and onions, and add them to the meat and gravy.

  3. Simmer on hot coals until the meat is warmed through, without boiling.

Serve

  1. Cover the bottom of a dish with slices of buttered toast.

  2. Lay the meat and vegetables on the toast and pour the gravy over them.

  3. Optionally, add tomatoes or serve green peas or Lima beans separately.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Potato + tomatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,798 recipes

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold mutton
Forms the main body of the hash and becomes tender when gently warmed in gravy.
Mutton bones and trimmings
Release flavour and gelatin into the water, building a rich, body-giving gravy.
Onions
Add savoury sweetness and aroma to the gravy as they cook down.
Potatoes
Add starch and body, thickening the hash and softening into the gravy.
Butter
Enriches the toast, adding fat, flavour and browning for the base.

The step that matters

Simmer without boiling. Keeping the hash at a gentle simmer warms the meat through while preventing the proteins from toughening and the gravy from reducing or breaking.

Swap the tomato

The recipe marks tomato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, pepper, onion, carrot, turnip, potato, butter):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, pepper, onion, carrot, turnip, potato, 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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