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Mutton with Currant Jelly Sauce

A sauce of browned butter, flour, brown stock, currant jelly, sherry, and seasoning served over sliced cold cooked mutton.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sherry work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Mutton with Currant Jelly Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat until browned.

  2. Add the flour and continue browning for a few minutes.

  3. Slowly add the brown stock while stirring constantly.

  4. Beat the jelly with a fork and add it to the sauce until melted.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the mutton and simmer gently until heated through.

  2. Stir in the sherry wine.

  3. Serve the mutton on a platter and pour the sauce over it.

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. Currant + sherrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Currant + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Browns with the flour to build a nutty, deeper flavour in the sauce base.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Brown stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and adds savoury meaty flavour.
Currant or wild plum jelly
Adds sweetness and fruity acidity that balances the rich, savoury sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the butter and flour. Cooking the butter and flour until golden toasts the flour and builds flavour. Stopping too early leaves a raw, pasty taste, while going too far scorches the roux and makes the sauce bitter.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Grapefits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, sherry, wine, mutton. 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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