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Minced Mutton

A dish of finely chopped mutton simmered in gravy and served over buttered toast, garnished with sliced lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Minced Mutton

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the cooked mutton very fine.

  2. In a frying pan, combine the chopped mutton with enough cooked gravy to moisten it.

  3. Season with pepper and salt.

  4. Heat until very hot.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over slices of buttered toast.

  2. Garnish with sliced lemon.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Mutton + lemontop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together888 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold mutton
Provides the main body of the dish once finely chopped and heated.
Cold gravy
Moistens the chopped meat so it does not dry out when reheated.

The step that matters

Heat until very hot. The mixture must be heated thoroughly because it is already cooked and is reheated; thorough heating ensures it is hot throughout before being served over toast.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, pepper):

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Red currantfits less well
  4. Mangofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, pepper. 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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