Why it works: Mutton and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,442 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓
A Good Mutton Pie
Ingredients
Directions
The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Prepare
Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Butter a dish and line it with the pastry.
Remove the fat from the mutton and keep the meat whole.
Slice the mutton into equal thickness cutlets.
Season the cutlets with salt, pepper, and cayenne.
Assemble and bake
Layer the cutlets in the dish, sprinkling minced herbs between layers.
Cover with more pastry and bake until golden brown.
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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Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together5,442 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
- Pastry
- Forms the crust that encloses the meat and browns in the oven.
- Mutton
- Provides the main filling; its fat is removed before cooking.
- Minced herbs
- Add aroma and flavour between the layers of meat.
The step that matters
Slice the mutton into equal thickness cutlets. Cutlets of uniform thickness cook at the same rate, so thin pieces do not dry out while thick pieces remain underdone.
“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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