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Spiced Shoulder of Mutton

A spiced mutton shoulder stewed with broth, vegetables, and herbs for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Spiced Shoulder of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the mutton

  1. Bone the joint and rub it with sugar mixed with cloves, pepper, mace, and ginger.

  2. Add salt the next day and keep the mutton turned and rubbed with the pickle for 8 to 10 days.

Stew

  1. Roll it up tightly and bind it with string.

  2. Stew it gently for 4 hours in beef broth or with neck of beef, water, onion, carrots, turnips, and herbs.

Serve

  1. Serve with its own gravy thickened with lemon-pickle or a good sauce piquante.

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. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton shoulder
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and rich during slow stewing.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it deeply during the long cure.
Sugar
Balances the salt in the cure and promotes browning and a rounded sweetness.
Cloves
Adds warm, pungent aroma that penetrates the meat during curing.
Beef broth
Supplies liquid for gentle stewing and carries flavour into the gravy.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 4 hours. Low, slow heat lets tough connective tissue slowly convert to gelatin, which makes the meat tender and gives the gravy body. Boiling vigorously tightens the muscle fibres and leaves the meat stringy and dry.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, sugar, clove, pepper, ginger, beef, onion):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, sugar, clove, pepper, ginger, beef, onion. 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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