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A Years Cookery

A stew made from mutton bones, vegetables, and seasonings, thickened with flour and flavored with ketchup and optional port.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 10,172 recipes mention both. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Combine mutton bones, shallot, carrot, celery or celery seeds, and water or stock in a pot.

  2. Stew gently for 2 hours.

Finish the gravy

  1. Strain the gravy and thicken it with flour.

  2. Add sugar browning, ketchup, and port if using.

Serve

  1. Place the meat on a dish, pour the gravy around it, and serve with glazed onions as garnish.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together10,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + oniontop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together21,599 recipes

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

  3. Celery + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together18,506 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Shallot + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,031 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + ketchuptop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton bones
Release flavour and gelatin into the liquid, giving the stew its body and savoury taste.
Flour
Thickens the strained liquid into a gravy with a smooth, coating texture.
Sugar browning
Adds colour and a deeper, slightly bitter caramel flavour to the gravy.
Ketchup
Adds acidity and sweetness that rounds out the savoury gravy.
Port
Adds sweetness, fruity aroma and depth to the gravy.

The step that matters

Thickening the strained gravy with flour. Flour must be fully dispersed before or as it is added to hot liquid, otherwise it clumps. Cooking it long enough removes raw starch taste and lets the starch swell to thicken the gravy evenly.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, shallot, carrot, celery, flour, sugar, ketchup):

  1. Leekbetter flavor fit
  2. Turnipbetter flavor fit
  3. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, shallot, carrot, celery, flour, sugar, ketchup. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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