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Meat Jelly

A chilled jellied mixture of lean beef, mutton, and veal simmered in water and salted.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and mutton are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,373 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Meat Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the beef, mutton, and veal into small pieces.

  2. Pour 1 quart of cold water over the meat and let it sit until the water is red.

Make the broth

  1. Place the mixture on the fire and simmer slowly for 3 hours.

  2. Remove from heat, strain the liquid, and add coarse sea salt to taste.

Set and serve

  1. Set the liquid in a cold place to jelly.

  2. Once set, cut into squares to serve cold or melt as needed.

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 + muttontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Beef + vealtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Mutton + vealtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,394 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the meat flavor and gelatin that lets the liquid set into a jelly.
Mutton
Adds savory meat flavor and gelatin to the broth as it simmers.
Veal
Contributes gelatin and a mild meat flavor that helps the liquid set.

The step that matters

Simmering slowly for 3 hours. A gentle simmer draws collagen from the meat into the liquid as gelatin without boiling it hard. Too vigorous a boil can cloud the broth and weaken the set.

“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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