Name: Chops As Beef Steaks
Ingredients: thick leg of mutton; 1 shalot; coarse sea salt; black pepper

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 ↓

Chops As Beef Steaks

Ingredients

thick leg of mutton
1 shalot
coarse sea salt
black pepper

Directions

Prepare

Cut thick steaks from a leg of mutton.
Rub each steak with a shalot.

Cook and serve

Broil the steaks over a hot fire.
Rub your serving dish with shalot.
Season the steaks with pepper and salt before serving.
Serve the steaks hot.

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.

Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,442 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton: Forms the main body of the dish, providing the meat that is cooked and served as steaks.
Shalot: Rubbed over the steaks and the serving dish, adding a mild aromatic onion flavour.

“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.