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Hotch-Potch

A hearty stew of turnips, carrots, lettuce, cauliflower, peas, mutton, onions, and spices boiled for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 526 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Hotch-Potch

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the turnips, carrots, lettuce, cauliflower tops, and peas in a large pot of boiling water for 2 hours.

  2. Add the chopped mutton, salt, pepper, and onions to the pot, then continue boiling for 1.5 hours.

  3. Add the green peas and boil for an additional 30 minutes before serving.

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. Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lettuce + cauliflowertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together151 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Cauliflower + peastop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides rich meat flavour and gelatinous body to the broth as it simmers for hours.
Full-grown peas
Break down slowly during the long boil, thickening the broth and adding body.
Turnips
Soften during long simmering and add a mildly sweet, earthy flavour to the broth.
Carrots
Soften during long simmering and add natural sweetness to the broth.
Onions
Soften during simmering and add savoury depth to the broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, lettuce, cauliflower, peas, mutton, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, lettuce, cauliflower, peas, mutton, pepper. 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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