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Crowdie

Crowdie is a Scottish mutton broth thickened with oatmeal, seasoned with pepper and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Crowdie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil a leg of mutton and reserve the cooking liquid.

Make the broth

  1. In a pot, mix the oatmeal with a little of the reserved liquid over heat to form a paste.

  2. Stir in the remaining liquid and add pepper and salt.

  3. Let it boil gently for 20 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. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  2. Mutton + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,442 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Mutton + oniontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,531 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

Oatmeal
Thickens the broth as its starches swell in the hot liquid, giving body.
Leg of mutton
Releases flavour and gelatin into the cooking liquid, giving the broth its savoury base.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic depth as they soften into the broth.

The step that matters

Forming the oatmeal paste. Adding oatmeal directly to hot liquid can clump into lumps. Mixing it first with a little liquid to a smooth paste lets the starch disperse evenly, so the broth thickens smoothly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, 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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