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Mutton Ha Rico

A mutton stew with sweet herbs, cloves, mace, pepper, salt, carrots, turnips, onions, and celery.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Mutton Ha Rico

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the mutton

  1. Fry the mutton chops until brown.

Stew

  1. Place them in a stew pan with sweet herbs, cloves, mace, pepper, and salt.

  2. Cover with boiling water and stew slowly for about 1 hour.

  3. Add diced carrots, turnips, sliced onions, and chopped celery to the stew pan.

  4. Keep covered except when skimming off fat.

  5. Let the stew gently for another hour.

Serve

  1. Serve in a deep dish with gravy.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton chops
Provide the meat, whose fat is skimmed and whose browning builds savoury flavour in the stew.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stew as they soften during long cooking.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and soften into the stew, thickening the liquid slightly.
Onions
Add savoury depth and sweetness as they cook down into the gravy.
Celery
Adds aromatic, vegetal flavour that blends into the long-simmered stew.

The step that matters

Skimming off fat while keeping the pot covered. Stewing renders fat from the mutton that rises to the surface; skimming it removes greasiness, while the lid limits evaporation so the liquid stays rich and the meat stays moist.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, clove, pepper, carrot, turnip, onion, celery):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, clove, pepper, carrot, turnip, onion, celery. 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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