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Haricot Mutton

A stew of browned mutton cutlets simmered in an onion and flour sauce with carrot, turnip, and button onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Haricot Mutton

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 Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the mutton by trimming the neck and cutting it into cutlets about ½ inch thick.

  2. Peel and slice the onion.

Brown the cutlets

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and add the onion and cutlets.

  2. Fry the cutlets over medium heat until they are nicely browned on both sides.

  3. Remove the cutlets and pour off excess grease, leaving the onion.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir in the flour and gradually add the second stock, stirring until it boils.

  2. Strain the sauce and return the cutlets to the stewpan with the sauce.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton neck cutlets
Provides the meat that is browned and then simmered in the sauce.
Butter
Fat for frying that browns the cutlets and adds richness.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Second stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the cutlets return to.
Onion
Softens and flavours the sauce, giving it its onion character.

The step that matters

Browning the cutlets. Frying over medium heat until well browned on both sides builds deep flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale, under-browned cutlets will taste flat in the finished sauce.

Swap the onion

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

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

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