Name: Mutton Pie
Ingredients: 1 lump of mutton; pepper; coarse sea salt; water; pie crust

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 ↓

Mutton Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Remove the skin and outside fat from the mutton.
Cut the mutton into steaks and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Bake

Place the seasoned mutton in a dish and pour in enough water to cover it.
Top with the pie crust and bake until well done.

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.

Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked 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

Mutton: Forms the main filling and provides the meat flavour and texture of the pie.
Pie crust: Encloses the filling and browns as it bakes, forming the top of the pie.

“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.