Skip to main content
Main

Hashed Mutton

A stew of mutton pieces with gravy, vegetables, and buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Hashed Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Season the cold mutton pieces with pepper and salt.

  2. Place the bones and trimmings in a saucepan, cover with water, and add sliced onions.

  3. Stew until a good gravy is formed, then skim and strain it into a stew pan.

Combine and heat

  1. Add the mutton to the gravy.

  2. Slice the boiled carrots, turnips, potatoes, and onions, and add them to the meat and gravy.

  3. Simmer gently until the meat is warmed through, avoiding boiling.

Serve

  1. Cover the bottom of a dish with slices of buttered toast.

  2. Lay the meat and vegetables on the toast and pour the gravy over them.

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. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Lean cold mutton
Forms the main body of the dish and is gently warmed through in the gravy.
Bones and trimmings from mutton
Release flavour and body into the water, producing the rich gravy.
Buttered toast
Soaks up the gravy and forms a soft base beneath the meat and vegetables.
Boiled potatoes
Add starch and bulk, thickening the dish and giving it a hearty texture.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until the meat is warmed through, avoiding boiling.. Boiling toughens and dries meat fibres and can make the gravy cloudy, so gentle heat keeps the meat tender and the sauce smooth.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, pepper, carrot, turnip, potato. 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

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipes