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Fillets of Mutton

Fillets of mutton served with a ragout of small roots, endive, sorrel puree, or love apple sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and sorrel share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 60 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fillets of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fillets

  1. Cut three fillets of mutton from between the haunch and the ribs.

  2. Slice each fillet into two long pieces.

  3. Remove the skin and nerves from three pieces and lard them.

  4. Combine the larded pieces with the others.

  5. Drain the fillets on a cover and remove any remaining skin.

Glaze and serve

  1. Dry them slightly with a hot poker and glaze the fillets.

  2. Serve with a ragout of small roots, endive, puree of sorrel, or love apple 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.

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. Endive + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together60 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Endive + appletop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Sorrel + appletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together46 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Sorrel + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together158 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Endive + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together129 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton fillets
The lean meat forms the main body of the dish and is what gets glazed and served.
Lard
Fat threaded into the lean meat keeps it moist and tender during cooking.
Small roots
Serve as a ragout alongside the meat, adding earthy sweetness and substance to the plate.
Puree of sorrel
Adds a sharp, acidic note that cuts through the richness of the mutton.
Love apple sauce
Brings bright acidity and sweetness that balances the savoury, fatty meat.

The step that matters

Dry the fillets with a hot poker before glazing. Meat surface must be dry for the glaze to adhere and brown rather than steam and slide off, so drying only slightly keeps the surface receptive without overheating the fillets.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, endive, sorrel, sauce. 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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