Name: Harrico of Mutton
Ingredients: 7 back-rib steaks; coarse sea salt; flour; 1 onion, minced; butter; brown sauce; turnips; carrots

Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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 ↓

Harrico of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Remove the skin and excess fat from the steaks.
Flatten the steaks with a cleaver and season with salt and flour.
Sprinkle the minced onion over the steaks.
Fry the steaks in butter until nicely browned.
Prepare a brown sauce while the steaks are frying.
Drain the steaks from the butter and add them to the brown sauce.
Use a turnip cutter to shape the turnips and cut the carrots into diamonds.
Boil the turnips and carrots until tender, then drain.
Add the vegetables to the mutton and sauce, and let them stew together for 30 minutes.
Serve the steaks neatly with the sauce and vegetables on top.

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.

Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together7,585 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together21,601 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,874 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Swap the onion

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

Parsnipfits better
Leekfits better
Shallotfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sauce, turnip, carrot. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.