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Neck of Mutton

A slow‑cooked stew of mutton neck with carrots, onions, celery, turnips, and butter, finished with a little coulis.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Neck of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mutton

  1. Trim the neck of mutton as for larding.

  2. Insert carrot strips into the mutton as you would bacon.

  3. Place a puree of roots under the mutton and garnish with carrot.

Make the puree

  1. In a stew-pan, combine stock, grated carrots, sliced onions, celery pieces, sliced turnips, and butter.

  2. Simmer gently until the roots are tender enough to pass through a tammy.

  3. Rub the mixture through the tammy and return it to the stew-pan with a little coulis.

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 + celerytop 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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton neck
Provides the rich meat that the dish is built around.
Carrots
Add sweetness and colour, and the grated carrot thickens the puree as it breaks down.
Onions
Soften during simmering to add savoury sweetness and body to the stew.
Celery
Softens as it simmers, adding aroma and body to the puree.
Turnips
Break down as they cook, thickening the puree and adding mild sweetness.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the puree.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until the roots are tender. Gentle simmering softens the roots evenly without boiling them hard. Fully tender roots pass through a tammy smoothly, while underdone pieces leave a grainy, uneven puree.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Lettucefits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

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