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Mutton Steaks

Mutton steaks coated in a ginger-flavored batter and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Mutton Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the loin of mutton into steaks and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Butter a dish.

  3. Lay the steaks in the buttered dish.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs and flour together with a little milk.

  2. Add the remaining milk, beaten ginger, and salt to the mixture.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture over the steaks.

  2. Bake for 30 minutes.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Pepper + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Set the batter into a custard-like coating as they cook.
Flour
Thickens the batter so it clings to the steaks and gives the coating body.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter so it spreads evenly over the steaks.
Butter
Adds richness and keeps the dish from sticking, helping the coating brown.
Beaten ginger
Adds warm aroma and spice to the batter.

The step that matters

Beat the eggs and flour with a little milk first. Whisking flour into a small amount of liquid before adding the rest separates the particles so they hydrate evenly. Adding all the liquid at once tends to leave lumps of dry flour in the batter.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, pepper, butter, milk, egg, flour):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, pepper, butter, milk, egg, flour. 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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