Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓
Breast of Mutton
Ingredients
Directions
Cook the mutton
Stew the mutton in gravy until the bones can be easily removed.
Score the meat and season it with salt, black pepper, and cayenne.
Broil the mutton until cooked to your liking.
While broiling, skim the fat from the stewing gravy.
Make the sauce and serve
Add butter rolled in flour, chopped gherkins, and pickled mushrooms to the gravy over heat.
Let the mixture boil, then pour it over the mutton or into the serving dish.
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.
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Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together12,525 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
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Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together13,580 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together124,287 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
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Mutton + mushroomtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together685 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
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Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together5,442 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Butter
- Melts into the gravy to add richness and a smooth, glossy body.
- All-purpose flour
- Rolled into the butter, it thickens the gravy as it boils.
- Gherkins
- Add sharp acidity that cuts through the rich, fatty gravy.
The step that matters
Let the mixture boil after adding the butter and flour. Flour needs to be heated fully while the gravy boils to cook out its raw taste and to thicken the sauce properly. Stopping early leaves the sauce pasty or floury.
“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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