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Boiled Necks of Mutton, a l’ANGLAISE

A boiled mutton neck dish with carrots, turnips, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip 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 ↓

Boiled Necks of Mutton, a l’ANGLAISE

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the necks

  1. Saw off the scrap of the necks and shorten the rib-bones to 4 inches.

  2. Detach the spine bone from the fleshy part of the neck and remove the spine adhering to the ribs.

  3. Pare the fat smooth and place the necks in a stewpan with water, salt, carrots, and turnips.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for about 2 hours until done.

  2. Dish the necks so the uncovered ends of the rib-bones fall between each other.

  3. Garnish with mashed turnips and turned carrots.

  4. Serve with gravy and caper sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mutton + carrottop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,878 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Mutton + turniptop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,558 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton necks
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender and flavourful as it slowly simmers.
Carrots
Add gentle sweetness and aroma to the cooking liquid and make a garnish.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and aroma to the cooking liquid and make a mashed garnish.

The step that matters

Boil for about 2 hours until done. Mutton neck is full of connective tissue, which needs long, gentle simmering to break down into gelatin. Too little time leaves it tough, while a hard rolling boil can toughen the meat and cloud the liquid.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, carrot):

  1. Turnipthe original
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Parsnipfits about as well
  4. Potatofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, carrot. 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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