Skip to main content
Main

Marinade for Beef and Mutton

A simple oil and vinegar-based sauce with onion, garlic, spices, and lime peel for marinating beef or mutton.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Marinade for Beef and Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Make the marinade

  1. In a bowl, combine salad oil and vinegar.

  2. Add sliced onion, chopped garlic, peppercorns, cloves, salt, thyme or marjoram, minced parsley, and lime peel, then mix well and let sit for a few hours before using.

Marinate the meat

  1. Soak meat in the marinade for several hours before cooking.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Thyme + limetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together305 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Parsley + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together547 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Salad oil
Carries the herbs and spices and keeps the meat moist during soaking.
Vinegar
Acidity helps tenderize the meat and brightens the flavour.
Bombay onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and flavour that soaks into the meat.
Garlic
Contributes pungent aroma that infuses the meat during marinating.
Dried thyme or marjoram
Provides herbal aroma that penetrates the meat's surface.

The step that matters

Soaking the meat for several hours. Acid and flavour compounds penetrate only slowly into meat, so too short a soak leaves the flavour mostly on the surface. Keeping the meat fully submerged and covered ensures even contact.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, onion, garlic, thyme, parsley, lime):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, onion, garlic, thyme, parsley, lime. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes