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Meat Jelly

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Meat Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a large pot, combine beef houghs, veal houghs, bones, gelatinous parts of pork, and enough water to cover them.

  2. Add coarse sea salt to taste and a bunch of onions, carrots, parsley, and celery.

  3. Boil slowly for 8 to 10 hours.

  4. After boiling, drain the mixture and pass it through a fine sieve into another pot.

  5. Bring the liquid to a slow boil and remove any fat and foam that rises to the surface.

  6. Clarify the jelly as needed.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

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

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, veal, pork, carrot, parsley, celery):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, veal, pork, carrot, parsley, celery. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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