Skip to main content
Main

Mutton

A stew of mutton pieces rolled in bacon, seasoned with parsley and sweet herbs, simmered with carrots and stock, served over mashed potatoes with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and cut the mutton into pieces.

  2. Roll each piece with a slice of bacon and season with parsley and sweet herbs.

Stew

  1. Stew in stock for 1.5 hours with 3-4 carrots.

Serve

  1. Serve on a circle of mashed potatoes.

  2. Pour white or brown sauce over the mutton.

  3. Garnish with carrot purée from a wire sieve.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Parsley + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Mutton + carrottop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,878 recipes

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

  5. Mutton + potatotop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together293 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Forms the main body of the stew and provides its rich meaty flavour.
Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour that bastes the mutton as it cooks.
Stock
Provides the cooking liquid that gently tenderises the meat and carrots.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body, and are puréed to garnish the dish.
Mashed potatoes
Form a starchy base that holds the meat and soaks up the juices.

The step that matters

Stewing the mutton in stock. Stewing at a gentle simmer over the full time breaks down tough connective tissue in mutton, making it tender. Boiling hard toughens the meat and clouds the liquid.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, parsley, carrot, sauce):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, parsley, carrot, sauce. 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.

You might also like

Mutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipes