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Hashed Mutton

Hashed mutton is a stew of mutton, vegetables, and gravy served over buttered toast.

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

Hashed Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat and gravy

  1. Cut the lean cold mutton into small pieces and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Place the bones and trimmings in a saucepan, cover with water, and add sliced onions. Stew until a good gravy is formed.

  3. Skim the gravy, strain it into a stew-pan, and add the mutton.

Add the vegetables and simmer

  1. Boil the carrots, turnips, potatoes, and onions, then slice and add them to the meat and gravy.

  2. Simmer the mixture until the meat is warmed through, but do not boil.

Serve

  1. Cover the bottom of a dish with slices of buttered toast, lay the meat and vegetables on top, and pour the gravy over them.

  2. Optionally, add boiled green peas or Lima beans instead of the other vegetables.

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 + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lean cold mutton
Provides the main meat, which is warmed through in the gravy rather than cooked again.
Bones and trimmings from mutton
Stewed in water to build a rich, flavourful gravy that carries the dish.
Potatoes
Add starch and body, thickening the stew and making it more substantial.
Buttered toast
Soaks up the gravy at the base, giving a soft, absorbent layer under the meat.

The step that matters

Simmer without boiling. Once the meat is in the gravy, boiling toughens cooked meat and can make it dry and stringy. Gentle simmering only warms it through while keeping it tender.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, pepper, carrot, turnip, potato. 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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