Why it works: Rye and caraway share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 87 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓
Soup Tablets
Ingredients
Directions
Make the mixture
Melt the suet in an iron pan over high heat until it becomes brown.
Stir in the rye-meal while continuing to heat and stir until the mixture is brown.
Add the dried salt and caraway seeds, mixing well.
Form and set
Pour the mixture into tin pans to form cakes.
Allow the cakes to cool and harden.
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.
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Rye + carawaytop 2% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together87 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Suet
- Provides fat that melts, browns and binds the mixture into a firm cake when cooled.
- Rye-meal
- Absorbs the melted fat and browns with heat, adding bulk and a toasted flavour.
- Caraway seeds
- Adds a warm, aromatic flavour to the fat and meal mixture.
The step that matters
Browning the suet and rye-meal. Heating the suet and rye-meal until brown drives off moisture and develops toasted flavour through browning reactions. Heating too gently leaves the mixture pale and bland, while overheating can scorch it and make it bitter.
“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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