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Boiled Neck of Mutton with Caper Sauce

A boiled neck of mutton served with caper sauce, carrots, mashed turnips, suet dumplings, and optional rice or pearl barley broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip 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 ↓

Boiled Neck of Mutton with Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the mutton

  1. Boil the neck of mutton until tender.

  2. Add carrots and cook until soft.

Prepare the sides

  1. Prepare mashed turnips and suet dumplings separately.

Serve

  1. Serve the broth first, adding rice or pearl barley to it.

  2. Top the mutton with caper sauce.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Turnip + ricetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together824 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mutton + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Mutton + carrottop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,878 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton neck
Long, gentle boiling breaks down connective tissue, leaving the meat tender.
Carrots
Cook down to soft, adding sweetness and body to the broth.
Turnips
Mashed, they add a mild, earthy sweetness and a soft texture to the plate.
Suet
Melts into the dumplings, adding fat that keeps them light and moist.
Capers
Their sharp, briny acidity cuts through the rich, fatty mutton.

The step that matters

Boil the neck of mutton until tender. Simmering slowly rather than boiling hard keeps the meat from toughening and lets collagen convert to gelatin, so the meat becomes tender rather than stringy.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, carrot, sauce, rice):

  1. Turnipthe original
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Leekfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, carrot, sauce, rice. 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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