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Mutton Dormers

Mutton dormers are small, fried meatballs made from mutton, rice, suet, shallot, breadcrumbs, and egg, served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and shallot work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Mutton Dormers

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook and dry the rice as directed.

  2. Mix the rice with the mutton, suet, shallot, salt, and pepper.

  3. Form the mixture into cork-shaped pieces.

  4. Coat each piece with egg and breadcrumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry in hot fat until nicely browned, about 5 to 6 minutes.

  2. Drain well.

  3. Serve garnished with crisply-fried parsley.

  4. Serve the gravy in a tureen.

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. Rice + shallottop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. 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

Mutton
Provides the savoury meat filling that the dormers are built around.
Cooked rice
Bulks out the filling and helps it hold its shape when formed.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the filling moist and rich as it cooks.
Egg
Binds the coated pieces so the breadcrumbs stick during frying.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns in the hot fat.

The step that matters

Fry in hot fat until nicely browned. Fat that is hot enough sets the egg and breadcrumb coating quickly, giving a crisp, browned crust. If the fat is cool, the coating soaks up grease and can fall away from the filling.

Swap the shallot

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, rice, pepper, egg. 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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