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Mince Meat

A minced mutton dish cooked with onions, ghee, and spices in a spiced gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Mince Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fry the sliced onions in ghee until golden.

  2. Add the mutton slices and cook until browned.

  3. Pour in enough water to cover the meat and simmer until tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the meat from the gravy and set aside.

  2. In the remaining gravy, add spices and adjust seasoning.

  3. Serve the meat with the spiced gravy.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Onion + cinnamontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Mutton + oniontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,531 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Mutton + gheetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together246 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the main protein; browning and slow simmering make it tender.
Onions
Sweeten and deepen the gravy as they turn golden in the ghee.
Ghee
Fat for frying that carries flavour and helps the onions and meat brown.

The step that matters

Simmer until tender. Mutton is tough connective tissue that needs long, gentle simmering in water to break down. Stopping early leaves the meat chewy, so check tenderness before removing it from the gravy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, ghee, clove, cinnamon):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, ghee, clove, cinnamon. 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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