Skip to main content
Main

Minced Meat

A dish of cooked minced meat simmered with onion, salt, pepper, flour, and stock, served with diced toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Minced Meat

Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Minced Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the cooked meat into thin slices lengthwise, then into small pieces crosswise.

  2. Place the minced meat in a wooden bowl.

  3. Remove any hard pieces of skin.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the meat in ½ cup of water for 2-3 hours, reducing to ½ cup of stock.

  2. Add the chopped onion, salt, pepper, and flour to the minced meat.

  3. Combine everything in a frying pan with the strained stock and simmer for 10 minutes.

  4. Serve with diced toast arranged around the dish.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  2. Meat + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,364 recipes

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

  3. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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

Cooked meat
Provides the main body of the dish and flavors the stock as it reduces.
Onion
Adds aroma and mild sweetness as it cooks into the mixture.
Flour
Thickens the stock so it clings to the minced meat.

The step that matters

Boiling the meat for 2-3 hours. Keep the liquid at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil. Vigorous boiling toughens the meat's proteins and can reduce the stock too quickly, leaving the flavor concentrated but the meat dry.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pepper, 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.

You might also like

Meat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipesMeatballsMeatballs37 recipesMince MeatMince Meat37 recipesMeat CakesMeat Cakes35 recipes