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Ico with Garlic

A slow‑cooked mutton bone broth flavored with garlic, shallot, carrot, celery, and optional ketchup, port, and glazed onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Ico with Garlic

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. In a pot, add garlic and mutton bones.

  2. Add shallot, carrot, celery (or celery seeds), and water or stock.

  3. Stew gently for 2 hours.

  4. Strain the gravy and thicken it with flour.

Finish and serve

  1. Add sugar browning, ketchup, and port if using.

  2. Place the meat on a dish, pour the gravy around it, and serve.

  3. Garnish with glazed onions.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Shallot + carrottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together803 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton bones
Release flavour and gelatin into the liquid as they stew, giving the gravy body.
Flour
Thickens the strained gravy so it coats the meat rather than running off.
Sugar browning
Adds a deeper brown colour to the gravy.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity to round out the gravy's savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 2 hours. Gentle heat without a rolling boil lets collagen in the bones slowly break down into gelatin, giving body to the gravy, while a hard boil can make the liquid cloudy and greasy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, shallot, carrot, celery, flour, sugar, ketchup):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, shallot, carrot, celery, flour, sugar, ketchup. 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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