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Minced Beef

A dish of diced cold beef simmered in gravy with mace, eschalot, salt, pepper, walnut catsup, and lemon juice, served with bread sippets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Minced Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the cold beef into small dice.

  2. In a stew-pan, combine reserved gravy, warm water, mace, eschalot, salt, and pepper.

Simmer and finish

  1. Simmer gently for 1 hour.

  2. Remove the meat and dish it.

  3. Add walnut catsup and lemon juice to the gravy, then boil it once more.

  4. Pour the hot gravy over the meat and serve with bread sippets.

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

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

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Pepper + walnuttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,039 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Reserved gravy
Provides the main liquid and savoury body that becomes the sauce.
Walnut catsup
Adds deep, tangy savoury flavour to the gravy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the gravy.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 1 hour. A gentle simmer, not a hard boil, lets the meat soften and release flavour while keeping the gravy clear and preventing toughening of the meat proteins.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, walnut, lemon, bread):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, walnut, lemon, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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