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Haricot Mutton

A stew of mutton, turnips, potatoes, and parsley cooked in a butter and flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Haricot Mutton

Why it works: Parsley and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,842 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Haricot Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the mutton

  1. Fry the mutton pieces in butter until browned, about 15 minutes.

  2. Stir in the flour and warm water.

  3. Add the tied parsley.

Add the vegetables

  1. In another pan, fry the turnips in butter until browned.

  2. Add the turnips and potatoes to the mutton 4 hours before serving.

Serve

  1. Put the meat and vegetables on a dish.

  2. Skim the fat off the sauce.

  3. Pour the sauce over the meat.

  4. Serve.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Turnip + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Browning in butter builds flavour and the meat provides the main body of the stew.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the meat juices and liquid.
Turnips
Browned in butter for colour and a sweet, savoury flavour, then cooked until tender in the stew.
Potatoes
Soften during long cooking and help thicken the sauce through their starch.
Parsley
Tied in a bundle so it flavours the sauce and can be removed before serving.

The step that matters

Add the turnips and potatoes to the mutton 4 hours before serving.. Mutton needs a long, gentle simmer to become tender, and the root vegetables must cook through without breaking down. Adding them too late leaves them firm, while adding them too early can turn them mushy.

Swap the potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, flour, butter, parsley, turnip. 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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