Name: Cooked Meat, Free From Bone
Ingredients: 5 oz cooked meat, free from bone (boiled bacon or pickled pork); 16 oz vegetables; 4 oz dumplings; 4 pints beer

Why it works: Meat and beer work together. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 93 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Cooked Meat, Free From Bone

Ingredients

5 oz cooked meat, free from bone (boiled bacon or pickled pork)
16 oz vegetables
4 oz dumplings
4 pints beer

Directions

Boil the bacon or pickled pork until cooked through.
Prepare the vegetables by boiling or steaming them until tender.
Make the dumplings according to your preferred recipe.
Serve the cooked meat with the vegetables and dumplings, alongside beer.

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.

Meat + beertop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together93 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon or pickled pork: Provides the main savoury, meaty flavour of the dish.
Vegetables: Add bulk and a tender texture alongside the meat.
Dumplings: Add a soft, starchy texture that absorbs flavour from the cooking liquid.

“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.