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Spiced Shoulder of Mutton

A boned shoulder of mutton, spiced and salted, pickled for over a week, then rolled and stewed in beef broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Spiced Shoulder of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Cure

  1. Rub the brown sugar, cloves, mace, pepper, and ginger into the boned mutton and place the meat in a deep dish.

  2. Rub in the coarse sea salt the next day.

  3. Add the beef gravy to the dish and turn the meat over.

  4. Rub the meat with the pickle daily for a week or ten days, keeping it in the pickle.

Roll and stew

  1. After a week, roll the meat tightly and bind the meat with string.

  2. Stew the meat gently in beef broth for four hours.

Serve

  1. Serve hot in its own gravy, with a piquant sauce or ketchup.

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. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Pepper + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 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

Mutton shoulder
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long gentle stewing.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps flavour the meat during the pickling period.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and draws moisture to form the pickle that cures it.
Beef gravy
Forms the pickling liquid and later the moist gravy served with the meat.
Cloves
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the meat.

The step that matters

Stew the meat gently. Gentle, slow heat lets the tough connective tissue in mutton break down into tender meat. Boiling hard tightens the muscle fibres and leaves the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mutton, sugar, meat, clove, pepper, ginger, beef):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mutton, sugar, meat, clove, pepper, ginger, beef. 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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