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Lean Meat Cakes

Lean meat cakes made from shredded beef, seasoned with pepper, salt, and optional Worcestershire sauce, mustard, horseradish, lemon juice, or dry celery.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lean Meat Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Remove all fat, fascia, connective tissue, and bone from the beef.

  2. Shred the meat with a blunt knife on a board or chipping tray.

  3. Scrape the shredded meat together with a spoon to remove tough parts.

Cook and serve

  1. Mould the scraped pulp into cakes about ½ to 1 inch thick.

  2. Slowly boil the cakes over a clear fire free from smoke.

  3. Serve on a hot plate with a little butter and season with pepper and salt.

  4. Add Worcestershire sauce, mustard, horseradish, lemon juice, or dry celery for flavor if desired.

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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides the main protein; scraping and shredding leave a tender pulp that holds together as cakes.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture when served on the hot cakes.

The step that matters

Scraping the shredded meat. Scraping removes tough connective tissue and fibrous parts that would make the cakes chewy. Thorough scraping leaves a smoother pulp that shapes into cakes and eats tender.

“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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