Skip to main content
Main

Ragout of Mutton

A slow‑cooked mutton ragout with peas, flavored with parsley, thyme, and browned flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Ragout of Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the meat

  1. Heat clarified dripping or butter in a frying pan.

  2. Add sliced onion and cook for 3 minutes.

  3. Dredge mutton chops in flour.

  4. Fry the dredged chops until browned.

  5. Transfer the chops to a saucepan.

  6. Add parsley and thyme.

  7. Cover the saucepan with cold water.

Stew and thicken

  1. Cook slowly for 2 hours until meat is tender.

  2. Remove the meat to a hot dish.

  3. Skim the gravy.

  4. Season the gravy with salt and pepper.

  5. Add soaked green peas.

  6. Stew the peas until soft.

  7. Rub the peas through a colander.

  8. Stir in butter mixed with browned flour.

  9. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  10. Pour the boiling mixture over 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 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

Mutton chops
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long slow stewing.
Browned flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the meat and peas.
Green peas
Are stewed and rubbed through a colander, giving the gravy body and a smooth texture.
Clarified dripping or butter
Carries the frying heat and adds richness for browning the chops and onion.
Onion
Softens and adds sweet, savoury flavour to the base of the gravy.

The step that matters

Brown the chops in the dredged flour. Browning the floured meat builds the colour and roasted flavour of the gravy. Pale, under-browned chops give a flat, washed-out result, so the chops should reach a deep golden brown before the water goes in.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, pepper, parsley, thyme, flour):

  1. Black-eyed peafits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Lentilsfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, pepper, parsley, thyme, flour. 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.

More mutton ragout recipes

Cold 4 See all 35 →

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes