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Harico of Mutton

A mutton stew with onions, herbs, turnips, tomatoes, carrots, and optional mushroom ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Harico of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the mutton

  1. Trim excess fat from the mutton steaks.

  2. In a frying pan, heat the mutton fat and fry the steaks until light brown, dredging them with flour.

  3. Season with salt and pepper.

Stew

  1. Add boiling water, onion, cloves, parsley, thyme, green onions, and bay leaf.

  2. Stew gently until the meat is nearly done.

  3. Remove from heat, skim off the fat, and add fried turnips with sugar, chopped tomatoes, and sliced carrots.

  4. Continue to stew until everything is cooked through.

Serve

  1. Remove the bundle of herbs and serve.

  2. Add mushroom ketchup if desired.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Thyme + turniptop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,352 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton neck steaks
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long gentle stewing.
Flour
Dredged on the steaks, it lightly coats the meat and helps it brown in the fat.
Mutton fat
Carries heat for browning the steaks and adds rich savoury flavour.
Turnips
Add body and a mildly sweet, earthy flavour to the stew.
Carrots
Add sweetness and colour, and soften into the thickened stewing liquid.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and moisture that brightens the rich, fatty broth.

The step that matters

Stew gently until the meat is nearly done. Gentle simmering breaks down the connective tissue in mutton slowly, making it tender. Boiling hard toughens the proteins and can leave the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, flour, pepper, clove, parsley, thyme, turnip):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, flour, pepper, clove, parsley, thyme, turnip. 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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