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Boiled Neck of Mutton with Caper Sauce

A boiled mutton neck served with boiled vegetables, suet dumpling, and caper sauce, accompanied by rice or pearl barley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Boiled Neck of Mutton with Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Boil the neck of mutton until tender.

  2. Prepare the carrots and turnips by peeling and chopping them.

  3. Make the suet dumpling according to your preferred recipe.

Serve

  1. Serve the broth first, adding boiled rice or pearl barley along with the meat.

  2. Serve the boiled vegetables and caper sauce on the side.

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. Carrot + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 recipes

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

  3. Turnip + ricetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together824 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Mutton + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

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

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

Neck of mutton
Slow boiling turns the tough connective tissue tender and flavours the broth.
Rice or pearl barley
Starch thickens the broth slightly and adds body to the dish.
Suet dumpling
Suet melts as it cooks, leaving the dumpling light, rich and tender.
Caper sauce
Capers add acidity and a sharp, salty contrast to the rich meat.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Turnipthe original
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Leekfits about as well

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