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Mutton — Continued.

A slow‑cooked mutton stew with onions, turnip, butter, and flour, served with rice, mashed potatoes, or boiled macaroni.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Mutton — Continued.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. In a pan, brown the mutton pieces over medium heat.

  2. Add 1 quart of water and simmer on the side of the fire.

Make the vegetable mixture

  1. In a frying pan, melt 3 tablespoons of butter and add onions and turnip.

  2. Stir in 1 teaspoon of flour and cook until golden.

Cook and serve

  1. Add this mixture to the simmering mutton and cook for 1.5 hours.

  2. Serve hot with rice, mashed potatoes, or boiled macaroni.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and flavorful as it simmers in the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the onions and turnip as they cook in the frying pan.
Onions
Soften and turn sweeter as they cook, adding savory depth to the stew.
Turnip
Holds its shape while cooking and adds a mildly sweet, earthy flavor.
Flour
Browns in the butter and thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and cook until golden. Cooking the flour in the butter until golden removes its raw taste and lets it thicken the stew smoothly instead of leaving lumps or a pasty flavor.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, butter, turnip, flour, rice):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, butter, turnip, flour, 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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