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Baking

Basting Roast Meat

A method for basting roast meat using various ingredients depending on the meat type.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 889 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Basting Roast Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Baste

  1. Baste the roast meat every 10 minutes at first, then more frequently.

  2. Use its own dripping for beef and mutton.

  3. For veal and poultry, add butter, suet, or dripping.

  4. For mutton and lamb, baste with claret, sweet herbs, and butter.

  5. For pig, use cream and melted butter.

  6. For veal and white meats, mix yolk of eggs, grated biscuits, and orange juice for basting.

Brown and serve

  1. To brown the meat, make the fire brisker or add a glaze.

  2. Dredge the joint lightly with flour when sufficiently roasted, then baste with butter or dripping.

  3. Stir the fire and serve the meat after three minutes.

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. Biscuit + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Biscuit + orangetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together371 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Meat + biscuittop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the surface and helps the meat brown.
Flour
Dredged over the joint, it helps form a crisp, golden crust when basted with fat.
Yolk of eggs
Combined with biscuit and juice for basting, it helps the glaze set and brown on the meat.
Claret
Adds moisture and flavour to the drippings used for basting mutton and lamb.

The step that matters

Basting frequency. Basting every 10 minutes at first keeps the surface moist so it does not dry out or scorch before the interior cooks. Frequent basting also transfers fat and juices back over the meat, encouraging even browning.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, butter, egg, biscuit, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, egg, biscuit, flour. 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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