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Haricot Mutton

A stew of mutton steaks with turnips, carrots, and button onions simmered in broth and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Haricot Mutton

Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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 ↓

Haricot Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim nearly all the fat from the mutton steaks and brown them in butter until light brown.

  2. Slice the turnips, carrots, and button onions.

Stew

  1. Layer the browned meat on top of the sliced vegetables in a pot.

  2. Add 1 pint of weak mutton broth.

  3. Prepare additional broth thickened with flour and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  4. Simmer the dish slowly for 1.5 hours.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton steaks
Provide the main meat, whose connective tissue softens into tender meat during slow simmering.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the meat, building savoury flavour and colour on its surface.
Turnips
Contribute body and a mildly sweet, earthy flavour as they soften in the stew.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and tender texture as they cook slowly in the broth.
Flour
Thickens the broth, giving the stew a smooth, body-rich sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer the dish slowly for 1.5 hours. Gentle, slow simmering lets the tough connective tissue in the mutton break down into gelatin, making the meat tender. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can break up the vegetables.

Swap the onion

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

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

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