Skip to main content
Main

Mutton

A savory stew of thinly sliced mutton cooked with butter, flour, lemon, onion, herbs, mace, gravy, anchovy, and finished with butter‑flour roux, served with pickles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mutton and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 170 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut thin slices of mutton against the grain and trim off skin and fat.

Make the stew

  1. In a stewpan, melt butter and add flour, lemon slices, onion, herbs, and mace.

  2. Add the mutton to the pan and stir for 5 minutes.

  3. Pour in gravy, minced anchovy, and butter rolled in flour; stir well.

  4. Stew for about 10 minutes, then dish and serve garnished with pickles and sliced lemon.

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. Mutton + anchovytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Onion + anchovytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,263 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour 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

Leg of mutton
Provides the meat that becomes tender during the gentle stewing.
Flour
Thickens the butter and gravy into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.
Gravy
Supplies the liquid that carries the flavours and keeps the meat moist.
Butter
Adds richness and helps carry the aromatic flavours of the herbs and mace.
Anchovy
Adds savoury depth to the sauce without tasting distinctly fishy.

The step that matters

Stew for about 10 minutes after adding the gravy. Once the liquid is in, the sauce should simmer gently rather than boil hard. Vigorous boiling can toughen the meat and cause the flour-thickened sauce to break or turn lumpy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, butter, flour, lemon, onion, anchovy):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, butter, flour, lemon, onion, anchovy. 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.

More mutton stew recipes

with Rice 14Irish 9with Carrots 5with Dumplings 4with Lettuce and Peas 4with Turnips 3 See all 234 →

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipesMutton SoupMutton Soup56 recipes