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Mutton Harico

A slow‑cooked mutton stew with herbs, spices, carrots, turnips, onions, and celery.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Mutton Harico

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the neck of mutton into chops and fry them until brown.

Stew

  1. Place the chops in a stew-pan with sweet herbs, cloves, mace, pepper, and salt.

  2. Cover the meat with boiling water and let it stew slowly for about 1 hour.

  3. Add diced carrots, turnips, sliced onions, and chopped celery to the stew-pan.

  4. Cover the pan tightly, except when skimming off fat, and let it stew gently for another hour.

Serve

  1. Serve in a deep dish with gravy around the meat.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Mutton neck
Provides the meat, whose collagen softens into tender chops during slow stewing.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stew as they soften during cooking.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and soft texture to the stew as they cook.
Onions
Add savoury sweetness and aroma as they soften into the stew.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavour to the stew as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Stew gently with the lid mostly on. Slow, gentle heat keeps the meat tender rather than tough, and a tight lid holds in moisture and flavour. Lifting the lid only to skim fat keeps the liquid from reducing too quickly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, clove, pepper, carrot, turnip, onion, celery):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, clove, pepper, carrot, turnip, onion, celery. 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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