Name: Minced Meat
Ingredients: cold boiled beef; cold boiled potatoes; 3 slices of salt pork

Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Minced Meat

Ingredients

cold boiled beef
cold boiled potatoes
3 slices of salt pork

Directions

Prepare

Remove all bones and gristle from the cold boiled beef.
Chop the beef and cold boiled potatoes into small pieces.

Cook and serve

Fry the salt pork in a skillet until brown.
Add the minced meat and potatoes to the skillet and cook for 20 minutes.
Serve in a covered dish with the slices of pork on top.

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.

Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,690 recipes

Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).
Potato + porktop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,668 recipes

Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).
Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,052 recipes

Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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 meat, which is chopped and cooked until heated through and tender.
Cold boiled potatoes: Adds starchy bulk and soft texture that absorbs the flavour of the pork fat.
Salt pork: Renders fat into the skillet for frying and browns to add savoury flavour.

“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.