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Hash of Cold Meat

A quick pan hash made with cold meat, onions, flour, and stock, seasoned with pepper, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,800 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Hash of Cold Meat

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat ghee or butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Add sliced onions and flour, and brown them together.

  3. Pour in the stock or gravy and add the slices of cold meat. Simmer for a few minutes.

  4. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and sugar to taste.

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. Ginger + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

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

  2. Ginger + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,595 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Ginger + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold meat
Forms the main body of the hash and supplies the meaty flavour.
Ghee or butter
Adds fat for frying and gives the onions a rich, savoury flavour.
Sliced onions
Soften and brown to add sweetness and savoury depth.
Flour
Browns with the onions and thickens the stock into a light gravy.
Stock or gravy
Provides moisture and liquid that binds the hash together.

The step that matters

Browning the onions and flour together. Cooking the flour in fat until golden removes its raw taste and helps thicken the liquid smoothly. Browning the onions adds sweetness; pale onions give a flat, less savoury hash.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, ghee, ginger, flour, pepper, sugar. 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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