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Old Fashioned Mince-meat

A spiced minced meat mixture with apples, currants, raisins, spices, wine, brandy, jam, preserves, and sweet cider or molasses.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 20 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Old Fashioned Mince-meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat and suet

  1. Boil the beef in minimal water until tender, then chop finely.

  2. Remove membrane from suet, dredge with flour, and chop finely.

  3. Mix suet with chopped beef and add coarse sea salt to remove fresh taste.

Combine and season

  1. In a large bowl, combine apples, sugar, currants, raisins, spices, orange juice and rind, lemon juice and rind, wine, brandy, jam, and preserves.

  2. Add sweet cider or molasses and additional salt to taste. This mixture is not to be 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.

  1. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Orange + cinnamontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the meaty body of the mincemeat once boiled and chopped.
Suet
Adds richness and a moist, tender texture as it blends through the filling.
Chopped greening apples
Supplies moisture and tartness that balance the sweetness of the sugar.
White sugar
Sweetens the mixture and helps preserve it along with the spirits.
Brandy
Adds aroma and helps preserve the uncooked mixture.
Madeira wine
Adds depth, aroma and moisture to the uncooked filling.

The step that matters

Keep the mixture uncooked. The filling is meant to stay raw, so the meat and suet must be fully boiled and finely chopped first, and the salt and spirits must be added in proper proportion, since cooking is not there to make it safe or to set it.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, apple, raisin, sugar, orange, lemon, cinnamon):

  1. Cranberryfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, apple, raisin, sugar, orange, lemon, cinnamon. 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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