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Meat Bread

A loaf of meat made from rabbit or hare, eggs, sugar, spices, flour, and butter, fried until cooked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Meat Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the rabbit or hare into large pieces and soak them in saline water for 30 minutes.

  2. Boil the salted meat pieces in fresh water until cooked.

Make and fry the cakes

  1. Remove the bones from the boiled meat and mix with eggs, sugar, powdered pepper, ginger juice, lemon juice, flour, salt, and enough water from boiling to form a mixture.

  2. Shape the mixture into rectangular cakes of moderate thickness.

  3. Cover the cakes with white paper and fry in butter over mild heat for about 30 minutes.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

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

  4. Rabbit + meattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together315 recipes

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

  5. Rabbit + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Rabbit or hare
Provides the main protein, forming the bulk and savory body of the cakes.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set when heated, holding the cakes together.
Flour
Adds body and helps the mixture hold its shape while frying.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and promotes gentle browning on the cakes' surface.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the meat.

The step that matters

Frying over mild heat under paper. Gentle heat lets the centre of the cakes set through before the outside browns or the butter burns. Covering them with paper traps moisture and slows surface drying, keeping the cakes tender.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rabbit, egg, sugar, pepper, lemon, flour, meat):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rabbit, egg, sugar, pepper, lemon, flour, meat. 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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