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Haricot of Mutton

A slow‑cooked mutton stew with carrots, onions, turnip, and cloves, seasoned with pepper and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Haricot of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the mutton into chops, removing all fat and gristle, and fry until brown.

  2. Peel the turnip and onions, scrape the carrot, and wash all vegetables well.

Make the stew

  1. In a pan, heat the dripping and stir in the flour until brown.

  2. Add the water and the mutton to the pan.

  3. Cut the vegetables into fancy shapes and stick the cloves into a piece of carrot.

  4. Add all the vegetables to the pan and season to taste.

  5. Simmer gently for 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Remove the cloves, dish up neatly, garnish with parsley, and serve hot.

  2. Avoid stirring with a spoon to keep the vegetables intact.

  3. For an improvement, stir in 1 tablespoon of piccalilli or mixed pickles (without vinegar) just before serving.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during slow simmering.
Onions
Soften during simmering, adding sweetness and savour to the broth.
Carrot
Softens as it cooks, adding sweetness and colour to the stew.
Turnip
Softens during simmering, adding mild sweetness and body to the stew.
Flour
Browned in the dripping and then cooked with the liquid to thicken it.
Dripping
Fat that carries flavour and helps brown the flour and meat.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 1.5 hours. Gentle heat lets the connective tissue in the mutton break down slowly and stay tender. A hard boil toughens the meat, falls apart the vegetables and makes the broth cloudy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, carrot, turnip, clove, flour, pepper):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, carrot, turnip, clove, flour, pepper. 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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