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Meat Pudding

A steamed pudding made from chopped cooked meat, pork fat, herbs, capers, cucumber pickle, eggs, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 303 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Meat Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the chopped meat, fat pork, powdered herbs, capers, cucumber pickle, beaten eggs, salt, and pepper in a bowl.

  2. Pack the mixture into a round buttered dish.

Cook and serve

  1. Steam for 30 minutes.

  2. Once cooled, turn out from the mold and slice thin.

  3. Serve with a green vegetable salad.

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. Capers + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Meat + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,208 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Cucumber + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,991 recipes

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

  4. Capers + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 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

What each ingredient does

Beaten eggs
Bind the mixture so it holds its shape when cooled and sliced.
Chopped cooked meat
Forms the bulk of the pudding and gives it its main flavor and body.
Fat pork
Adds moisture and richness so the pudding does not turn dry while steaming.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, pork, capers, egg, pepper):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pork, capers, egg, pepper. 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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