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Mutton Stew

A stew of mutton pieces simmered with onion juice, ginger, garlic, pepper, salt, ghee, flour, and stock, optionally with vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Mutton Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the mutton into stew pieces, wash, and dry the meat.

  2. Mix the onion juice, ginger, garlic, pepper, and salt with the meat, and let it marinate for 1 to 4 hours.

Cook the stew

  1. In a large stewpan, heat the ghee or lard until boiling, then fry the meat until browned.

  2. Pour in the marinated mixture and simmer for 15–20 minutes.

  3. Thicken some stock with flour and add it to the stew, then simmer until the meat is tender.

Add vegetables and serve

  1. If using vegetables, remove the original gravy, add the soaked vegetables, and cover with hot stock.

  2. Simmer until the vegetables are tender, then return the original gravy and serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Ginger + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,402 recipes

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

  3. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

  4. Ginger + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

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

  5. Onion + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,595 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Long simmering breaks down its connective tissue, making the meat tender and rich.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a gravy that clings to the meat and vegetables.
Ghee or lard
Fat for frying the meat, promoting browning that adds savoury flavour.
Onion juice
Adds moisture and savoury flavour to the meat during marinating.
Ginger
Adds aromatic, warm flavour to the marinade.

The step that matters

Browning the meat in hot fat. Frying the meat until well browned builds deep savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale, steamed meat gives a flatter stew, so the pieces should be dried first and fried in batches if needed.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, onion, garlic, pepper, ghee, flour, meat):

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion, garlic, pepper, ghee, flour, meat. 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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