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Haricot Mutton

A slow‑cooked mutton stew with carrots, turnip, onion, and a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Haricot Mutton

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Haricot Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mutton

  1. Remove the skin and excess fat from the mutton and cut it into neat pieces.

  2. Heat the dripping in a saucepan and brown the mutton pieces nicely.

Make the stew

  1. Remove the browned mutton and fry the onion in the same saucepan.

  2. Pour away the fat, then return the mutton to the saucepan with the chopped vegetables, pepper, salt, and hot water.

  3. Cover tightly and simmer slowly for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot platter with the vegetables around it.

  2. Keep warm while you thicken the gravy with flour and ketchup; stir until boiling, skim, and pour around the meat.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow simmering.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy as it comes to the boil.
Ketchup
Adds tangy sweetness and colour to the gravy.
Onion
Softens and adds savoury depth to the base of the stew.

The step that matters

Simmering the mutton slowly with the lid on. Gentle, covered simmering breaks down the tough connective tissue in mutton so it becomes tender. A hard boil or uncovered pan can toughen the meat and reduce the liquid too quickly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, flour, ketchup, carrot, turnip, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, flour, ketchup, carrot, turnip, pepper. 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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