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Cold Mutton Re-cooked with Wine

A dish of re-cooked cold mutton simmered with vegetables, thickened gravy, and finished with Madeira wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cold Mutton Re-cooked with Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mutton

  1. Stick 8-10 cloves into the mutton.

  2. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Simmer and thicken

  1. Place the mutton in a stew pan with carrots, turnips, onions, parsley, and celery tops.

  2. Cover with cold water.

  3. Simmer until the vegetables are tender.

  4. Remove the meat.

  5. Skim off the fat from the gravy.

  6. Thicken the gravy with butter rolled in flour.

  7. Let it boil for 1-2 minutes.

  8. Stir in the Madeira wine before serving.

Serve

  1. Pour the gravy over the meat.

  2. Serve.

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

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the meat that is re-cooked until tender in the simmering liquid.
Flour
Thickens the gravy when rolled in butter and stirred in during boiling.
Butter
Combines with flour to form a roux that thickens the gravy and adds richness.
Madeira wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the gravy, stirred in just before serving.
Onions
Release sweetness and flavour into the simmering liquid to season the gravy.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy with butter rolled in flour. Flour must be cooked for a minute or two at a boil to lose its raw taste and to thicken fully. Adding it without boiling leaves the gravy pasty and floury.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, clove, pepper, carrot, turnip, parsley, celery):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, clove, pepper, carrot, turnip, parsley, 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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