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Chop Stewed

A slow‑cooked mutton chop stewed in water and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Mutton and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,442 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Chop Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim all fat from the mutton chop.

  2. Dip the chop in cold water and lightly pepper it.

  3. Dredge the chop with flour.

Stew

  1. Place the chop in a small earthenware jar with a tightly fitting lid.

  2. Add 3-4 tablespoons of water to the jar and cover it.

  3. Set the jar in a saucepan of water and stew gently for 1.5 hours.

  4. Turn the chop over halfway through cooking.

Serve

  1. Carefully skim the gravy and serve very hot.

  2. If needed, add another spoonful of gravy, preferably stock.

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. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mutton + flourtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton chop
Provides the meat that becomes tender during slow, gentle stewing.
Flour
Coats the chop and thickens the gravy as it cooks.
Water
Creates steam and moist gravy inside the sealed jar.

The step that matters

Set the jar in a saucepan of water and stew gently. Gentle, indirect heat in a water bath keeps the meat's proteins from tightening too fast. Boiling or rapid heat would toughen the chop and reduce the gravy too quickly.

“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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