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Minced Mutton

A dish of finely minced mutton mixed with a seasoned gravy.

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 ↓

Minced Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Remove all fat, gristle, and sinew from the mutton meat.

  2. Place bones and trimmings in a saucepan, cover with cold water, and add onion, mace, clove, peppercorns, and bouquet garni.

  3. Simmer until the gravy is flavorful, then strain and season with salt and sugar browning.

  4. Let the gravy sit to remove fat, then finely mince the meat or pass it through a sausage machine.

Combine and season

  1. Combine the minced meat with just enough gravy to moisten it, and season with pepper and salt.

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. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  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

Meat from the neck of mutton
Provides the main body of the dish, and its fat and connective tissue are removed before mincing.
Cold water
Extracts flavor and gelatin from the bones and trimmings as it simmers into gravy.
Bouquet garni
Adds herbal aroma to the gravy without adding loose bits to the finished mince.
1 teaspoon flour
Thickens the gravy slightly so it coats the minced meat.
Sugar browning
Adds color and a faintly sweet, caramelized flavor to the gravy.

The step that matters

Removing the fat before mincing. Fat left in the gravy or meat floats or pools and can make the mince greasy and heavy. Letting the gravy rest lets the fat rise and solidify so it can be skimmed off, leaving a cleaner, better-textured result.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, mutton, onion, clove, parsley, thyme, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, mutton, onion, clove, parsley, thyme, 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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