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Stewed Mutton Chop

A stew of mutton chops cooked with celery, carrot, turnip, and optional potatoes, thickened with browned flour and thin cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Stewed Mutton Chop

Oven, in the book's wordsA very moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe and trim the fat from the mutton chops, removing the bone.

Stew

  1. Place the chops in a double boiler and cover with hot water.

  2. Add the minced celery, diced carrot, and diced turnip.

  3. Cover and cook until the chops are tender.

  4. If desired, add sliced potatoes when the meat is nearly done.

Thicken and finish

  1. Remove excess grease and thicken the liquid with browned flour mixed with thin cream.

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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Celery + potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,047 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 chops
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender and flavours the stewing liquid as it cooks.
Browned flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy, with a toasted, nutty flavour from browning.
Thin cream
Mixed with the flour to make the thickening smoother and add richness to the gravy.

The step that matters

Cover and cook until the chops are tender. Mutton chops are tough connective tissue that only softens with long, gentle moist heat. Cooking too fast or with the lid off can leave the meat chewy and the liquid over-reduced.

Swap the potato

The recipe marks potato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, celery, carrot, turnip, flour, cream):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, celery, carrot, turnip, flour, cream. 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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