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Boiled Mutton

A boiled mutton dish cooked with optional barley, rice, onion, carrot, or celery.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Boiled Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe the meat with a damp cloth, roll it tightly, and tie it with twine or muslin.

  2. Place the bones in a pot with salt and enough water to cover the meat.

  3. Heat to boiling.

  4. Weigh the meat.

Cook the meat

  1. Allow 15 minutes to heat through, plus 15 minutes for each pound.

  2. Add the meat to the pot.

  3. Boil quickly.

  4. Reduce heat to maintain a gentle simmer.

  5. Keep the pot covered while cooking.

  6. Optionally, add barley, rice, onion, carrot, or celery to the water for flavor.

Finish the broth

  1. Remove 1 pint of liquid when done.

  2. Thicken with flour mixed with cold water.

  3. Season to taste.

  4. Boil for 5 minutes.

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. Barley + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together784 recipes

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

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Barley + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together571 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light, smooth broth when mixed with cold water first.
Barley or rice
Optional cereal that adds body and thickens the broth as it cooks.

The step that matters

Reduce heat to maintain a gentle simmer. Boiling hard toughens the meat's proteins and makes the broth cloudy, while a gentle simmer lets connective tissue slowly soften into tender meat and a clearer liquid.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, meat, flour, barley, carrot, celery):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, meat, flour, barley, carrot, 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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