Name: Mutton with Rice and Sausages
Ingredients: 1 pound cooked mutton, minced; ½ pound sausage meat; ¼ pound rice; Salt and pepper to taste; Gravy

Why it works: Rice and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,379 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mutton with Rice and Sausages

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sausage

Make the sausage meat into small balls.
Fry the sausage balls for 1-2 minutes until browned.
Drain the sausage balls.

Cook and serve

Add the sausage balls to the gravy and simmer for 10 minutes.
Boil the rice as for curry or use saffron rice.
Serve the minced mutton surrounded by the rice.
Top the dish with the sausage balls.

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.

Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,379 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Meat + ricetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,481 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Mutton + meattop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together936 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,442 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Mutton + ricetop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,019 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

Cooked mutton: Forms the main body of the dish, providing the bulk of the meat and flavour.
Sausage meat: Adds savoury richness and browned flavour from frying the balls.
Rice: Provides a starchy base that absorbs the flavour of the dish around the meat.

The step that matters

Frying the sausage balls. Frying for only 1-2 minutes must be enough to brown the outside. Browning develops savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction, and the balls should be drained so excess fat does not thin the gravy when they are simmered.

“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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Mutton with Rice and Sausages