Skip to main content
Main

Mutton Chops, to Stew

Stewed mutton chops simmered in water with onion, served with boiled turnips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Chops, to Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the mutton

  1. Place the mutton chops in a saucepan and cover with cold water, adding an extra ½ cup.

  2. Add the onion and bring to a boil, skimming off any foam.

  3. Cover the pan tightly and reduce the heat to simmer gently for about 45 minutes, until the chops are tender.

Serve

  1. Serve the chops with boiled turnips and the broth they were stewed in.

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. Mutton + oniontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,531 recipes

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

  3. Mutton + turniptop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,558 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton chops
Provide the meat, which becomes tender as it simmers slowly in liquid.
Cold water
Forms the broth, and starting cold lets foam rise to be skimmed off as it heats.
Onion
Adds aroma and subtle sweetness to the broth as it cooks.

The step that matters

Simmer gently with the lid on. Boiling hard toughens meat proteins and makes the broth cloudy, so a gentle simmer under a tight cover keeps the chops tender and the broth clear.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, onion):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Turnipthe original
  4. Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, onion. 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.

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesHaricot MuttonHaricot Mutton59 recipesMutton SoupMutton Soup56 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipes