Skip to main content
Main

Hotch-Potch of Mutton

A hearty mutton stew with onions, turnips, carrot, cabbage, and optional Scotch barley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Hotch-Potch of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Place the mutton chops and the scrag end into a bag with ½ cup of water.

  2. Sweat gently over a saucepan with another ½ cup of water.

Make the stew

  1. Add the whole onions, turnips, carrot, cabbage, and thyme; sweat gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Pour 3 quarts of boiling water over the mixture, season with salt and pepper, and skim well.

  3. Stew for 2 hours, skim off the fat, and place the chops in a soup dish, leaving out the scrag.

  4. Untie the cabbage and add it to the soup.

  5. Garnish with toasted sippets and add Scotch barley if desired.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + barleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together629 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Turnip + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,352 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 meat and rich flavour that the broth is built on.
Round onions
Soften during slow cooking and add sweetness to the broth.
Turnips
Turn tender in the broth and add subtle sweetness and body.
Savoy or white cabbage
Cooks down in the broth, adding mild sweetness and soft texture.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and colour to the broth as it cooks.

The step that matters

Skim well after adding the boiling water. Meat releases foam and fat as it heats. Skimming removes these impurities, giving a clearer, cleaner-tasting broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, turnip, carrot, cabbage, thyme, pepper, barley):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, turnip, carrot, cabbage, thyme, pepper, barley. 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 stew recipes

with Rice 14Irish 9with Carrots 5with Dumplings 4with Lettuce and Peas 4with Turnips 3 See all 234 →

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesRed CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipes