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Boiled Mutton

A boiled mutton dish seasoned with salt, peppercorns, onion, and served with parsley‑and‑butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,843 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boiled Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim the mutton and remove the pith from the bones.

Boil the mutton

  1. Bring the water to a boil, then add the mutton and boil quickly for 2 minutes.

  2. Add the salt, reduce heat, and skim the surface.

  3. Add the onion and peppercorns, then simmer gently for 1.5 hours, skimming occasionally.

Serve

  1. Remove the mutton and pour the parsley-and-butter sauce over it.

  2. If serving turnips, slice and boil them with the meat for 45 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. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  2. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Mutton + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,781 recipes

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

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Neck of mutton
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Parsley-and-butter sauce
Adds richness and fresh herbal flavour to the cooked meat.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness to the cooking liquid as it simmers.

The step that matters

Simmer gently after the initial boil. A vigorous boil toughens meat proteins and makes the meat stringy, so the heat must drop to a gentle simmer. Regular skimming removes foam and impurities that would otherwise cloud the broth and taint the flavour.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Pepperfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, butter, sauce, onion. 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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