Name: Cold Meat Turnovers
Ingredients: wheat dough; cold meat, chopped fine; pepper; coarse sea salt; catsup; sweet herbs; lard for frying

Why it works: Wheat and pepper work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 984 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cold Meat Turnovers

Ingredients

Directions

Make the turnovers

Roll out the wheat dough very thin.
Place chopped cold meat in the center, seasoned with pepper, coarse sea salt, catsup, and sweet herbs.
Fold the dough over to form a turnover.

Fry

Fry in lard until the dough is well cooked.

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.

Wheat + peppertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together984 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Wheat + meattop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together152 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,777 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat dough: Forms the thin outer shell that encloses the filling and crisps when fried.
Cold meat: Provides the main filling, with its flavor carried through the fried dough.
Lard: Fries the turnover, browning the dough and adding richness to its crust.

“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.