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Potted Cold Boiled Beef

A dish of cold boiled beef pounded with anchovies and butter, seasoned, and packed into pots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,847 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Potted Cold Boiled Beef

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the beef

  1. Remove the skin and muscle from the cold boiled beef.

Make the potted mixture

  1. Pound the beef in a mortar with a few honed anchovies and enough fresh butter.

  2. Season with spices to taste.

  3. Pack the meat mixture into pots.

Finish

  1. Optionally, place the pots in a 400°F (200°C) oven for a few minutes to condense the meat and exclude air.

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. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold boiled beef
Provides the main body of the potted mixture, pounded into a spreadable texture.
Honed anchovies
Adds a savoury, salty depth that enriches the flavour of the meat.
Fresh butter
Adds fat and moisture, helping bind the pounded meat into a smooth, spreadable paste.

The step that matters

Pounding the beef with butter. Pounding breaks the meat into fine fibres and blends in the butter evenly. Uneven pounding leaves a grainy texture and pockets of unmixed fat, so the paste may not hold together or spread well.

“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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