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Ragout of Mutton

A slow‑cooked stew of mutton with butter, flour, onions, carrots, peas, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Ragout of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Make the ragout

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan.

  2. Add the flour and brown it.

  3. Stir in the diced carrot and onion, along with the seasonings and mutton.

  4. Cook, stirring frequently, until everything is browned.

  5. Add the water or stock, cover, and let it simmer for two hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the peas just before serving.

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 + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Carrot + peastop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,994 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during the long simmer.
Flour
Browned in the butter, it thickens the sauce and adds toasty flavor.
Butter
Fat for the pan that carries flavor and helps the flour brown.
Onion
Softens and sweetens as it browns, adding savory depth to the sauce.
Carrot
Adds gentle sweetness and body to the sauce as it cooks.

The step that matters

Browning the flour and mutton. Browning builds deep flavor through the Maillard reaction. If the pan is too crowded or the heat too low, the meat steams instead of browning, leaving the sauce flat and grey.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, butter, flour, onion, carrot, clove, parsley):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, butter, flour, onion, carrot, clove, parsley. 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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