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Cutlets a LA Irish Stew

A stew of mutton cutlets simmered with onions, herbs, veal broth, and potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Cutlets a LA Irish Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the mutton into chops and season with pepper, salt, mushroom powder, and beaten mace.

  2. Place the chops in a stew pan and add the sliced onion, parsley, thyme, and veal broth.

Stew and serve

  1. Simmer the chops until three-quarters cooked.

  2. Add the peeled whole potatoes and let them stew until fully cooked.

  3. Remove the parsley and thyme before serving in a deep dish.

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. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Mushroom + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 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 chops
Provides the main meat, whose fat and connective tissue enrich the broth as it simmers.
Potatoes
Absorb the savoury broth and become soft, adding body and starch to the stew.
Veal broth
Supplies the liquid that cooks the meat and potatoes and carries the flavour through the dish.
Onion
Releases sweetness and aromatic flavour into the broth during the slow simmer.

The step that matters

Simmer the chops until three-quarters cooked. Cooking the meat gently in liquid keeps it tender. If it boils hard, the proteins tighten and toughen the meat, and the potatoes added later may then break down before the chops are done.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, pepper, mushroom, onion, parsley, thyme, veal):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, pepper, mushroom, onion, parsley, thyme, veal. 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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