Skip to main content
Main

Mutton Soup

A soup made with mutton, bacon, peas, turnips, carrots, and vegetables, finished with butter and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Mutton Soup

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Mutton Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pea base

  1. Combine the bacon and a quart of peas with enough water in a saucepan.

  2. Boil until the peas are a pulp, then strain and set aside.

  3. Add enough water to the bacon water to boil the mutton.

Make the soup

  1. Add sliced turnips and carrots, and boil slowly for 1 hour.

  2. Add chopped sweet herbs, onions, cabbage, and lettuce.

  3. Stew for an additional 15 minutes until the mutton is cooked.

  4. Remove the mutton from the pot.

  5. Add fresh green peas and chopped parsley to the soup along with the strained peas.

  6. Roll the butter in flour and add it to the soup.

  7. Stew until the green peas are cooked.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + cabbagetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 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

Mutton neck
Provides the main meat and rich flavour as it simmers into the broth.
Peas
Break down into a pulp that thickens the soup and adds body.
Gammon of bacon
Adds smoky, salty savour to the water used for the pea base.
Butter
Rolled in flour, it enriches the soup and helps thicken it as it melts.
Turnips and carrots
Soften during slow boiling, adding sweetness and body to the broth.

The step that matters

Boil the pea base until it becomes a smooth pulp. If the peas are not fully broken down, the strained base will not thicken the soup or give it its body. Gentle, sustained boiling softens the starch and skins so they collapse into a pulp.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, turnip, carrot, onion, cabbage, lettuce, parsley):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, turnip, carrot, onion, cabbage, lettuce, parsley. 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.

More mutton soup recipes

with Tapioca 10White 8Oyster 4 See all 77 →

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesGreen PeasGreen Peas229 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesRed CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipes