Name: Mutton Tea
Ingredients: 1 pound good mutton, trimmed of fat and sliced thin; 1½ pints boiling water; 1 ounce clean pearl barley (optional)

Why it works: Mutton and barley work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 510 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

Mutton Tea

Ingredients

1 pound good mutton, trimmed of fat and sliced thin
1½ pints boiling water
1 ounce clean pearl barley (optional)

Directions

Make the mutton tea

Place the sliced mutton in a pot.
Pour boiling water over the mutton.
Boil for 30 minutes, then strain the mixture.

Add the optional barley

If using barley, soak it in boiling water for 1 hour, then add it to the pot and boil with the mutton tea.
Strain to separate the undissolved barley.

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.

Mutton + barleytop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together510 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton: Gives the tea its meaty flavor as its juices and flavor leach into the hot water.
Pearl barley: Releases starch as it cooks, lightly thickening the tea and adding body.

“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.