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Lean Meat Cakes

Lean meat cakes are seasoned beef patties cooked over a clear fire.

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 on a board using a blunt knife.

  3. Scrape the pulp together with a spoon, discarding tough fibrinous parts.

Shape and cook

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

  2. Broil the cakes slowly over a clear fire free from smoke.

Season and serve

  1. Season the cakes with salt and pepper.

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

  3. Serve the cakes on a hot plate with a little butter.

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

Beef
Forms the cakes; lean meat pulp provides the main body and protein structure of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and a little moisture when served on the hot cakes.

The step that matters

Broil the cakes slowly over a clear fire free from smoke. Slow cooking over steady, clean heat cooks the meat through while it browns gently. Smoke or flare-ups can leave a bitter, sooty taste on the surface.

“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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