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Mutton

A simple mutton stew with onions, carrots, turnips, butter, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the mutton into small chops and trim off most of the fat.

Brown the meat and onions

  1. In a stew pan, melt the butter and sprinkle in a little flour.

  2. Add the sliced onions and stir until browned.

  3. Add the mutton and brown it completely.

Stew

  1. Pour in the water and add the sliced carrots and turnips.

  2. Season with pepper and salt, then stew until tender, about 30 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 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
Provides the main meat, whose connective tissue softens into tender bites during slow stewing.
Butter
Carries flavour and browns with the flour and onions, adding richness to the stew.
Flour
Lightly coats the pan and helps thicken the cooking liquid into a gravy.
Onions
Browning them builds sweetness and savoury depth in the base of the stew.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and firm texture that holds up through long stewing.
Turnips
Add a mild, earthy sweetness and soft texture to the finished stew.

The step that matters

Browning the mutton completely. Browning creates Maillard flavour compounds on the meat surface, which give the stew its deep, savoury taste. Pale meat yields a flatter-tasting stew.

Swap the onion

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

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

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