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Recipe for Deviled Meats

A preserved meat product made by grinding pork and beef, seasoning, stuffing into bags, and cooking and waxing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and beef match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Recipe for Deviled Meats

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 155°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Grind and mix

  1. Grind one-third of the hog cheek meat through a 7/64-inch plate.

  2. Grind the remaining hog cheek meat and beef hearts through a 1-inch plate.

  3. Mix all the ground meat together for about 4 to 5 minutes.

Stuff and cook

  1. Stuff the mixture into plain cotton bags, weighing about 5 pounds each.

  2. Cook the bags in water at a temperature of 155°F to 160°F for about four hours.

Hang, wax and chill

  1. Hang the cooked bags in a dry room for about ten hours.

  2. Dip the bags in paraffin wax at a temperature of 210°F, allowing them to cool for half a minute before dipping again.

  3. Place the dipped bags in a cooler for four to five hours before shipping.

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. Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Pork + sugartop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,579 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Beef + sugartop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Dry-cured extra lean pork trimmings
Lean meat that forms the bulk of the mixture and gives it a firm, sliceable body.
Neck bone or similar trimmings
Adds fat and connective tissue, contributing richness and a more cohesive texture.
Beef hearts
Dense lean muscle that adds savory meaty flavor and firmness to the mixture.

The step that matters

Dipping in paraffin wax. Wax at 210°F and a brief cooling pause between dips builds a sealed, even coat. Wax that is too hot or applied too thickly can run or crack, and the pause lets each layer set before the next.

“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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