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Minced Mutton

A savory minced mutton dish with a gravy made from bones, spices, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Minced Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Remove all fat, gristle, and sinew from the neck of mutton.

  2. Place bones and trimmings in a saucepan, cover with cold water, and add onion, mace, clove, peppercorns, and bouquet garni.

  3. Mix flour with a little cold water to form a paste and add to the saucepan.

  4. Simmer until the gravy is good, then strain and season with salt and sugar browning.

  5. Let the gravy stand to remove fat.

Mince and moisten

  1. Finely mince the meat or pass it through a sausage machine.

  2. Combine the minced meat with just enough gravy to moisten it, and season with pepper and salt.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Neck of mutton
Provides the meat that is minced, and the bones and trimmings add body to the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the minced meat rather than running off.
Onion
Adds savoury depth to the gravy as it simmers with the bones.

The step that matters

Simmering the gravy. Simmering gently rather than boiling keeps the liquid clear and extracts flavour from the bones slowly. Straining afterward removes solids, and letting it stand lets fat rise so it can be skimmed off.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, onion, clove, parsley, thyme, flour, sugar):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion, clove, parsley, thyme, flour, sugar. 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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