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Minced Galantine

A savory galantine made from minced boiled beef, breadcrumbs, herbs, and eggs, simmered with onion and carrot, then glazed with gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Minced Galantine

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Pass the beef through a mincing machine.

  2. Mix the minced beef with bread crumbs, parsley, lemon peel, onion, salt, pepper, spice, and nutmeg.

  3. Moisten the mixture with the raw eggs and shape it into an oblong on a floured board.

Cook and press

  1. Wrap tightly in a buttered cloth, sewing in the middle and tying at each end.

  2. Place in a large stewpan, cover with boiling water, and add the sliced onion and carrot.

  3. Simmer gently for two hours.

  4. Remove the galantine and press between two flat dishes with a weight on top; leave overnight.

Glaze and serve

  1. Remove the cloth, wipe the meat, and cover evenly with glaze.

  2. For the glaze, soak gelatine in cold water until softened, then add to a saucepan with blackjack and boiling water.

  3. Stir until the gelatine melts, but do not boil, and use while warm.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled beef
Forms the main body of the galantine and gives it its meaty texture.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and help the mixture hold together while it cooks.
Raw eggs
Bind the minced meat so the shaped loaf keeps its form.
Gelatine
Sets the glaze so it coats the meat and firms as it cools.

The step that matters

Stir the glaze without boiling. Boiling gelatine weakens its setting power, so the glaze may not firm properly over the meat when it cools.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, bread, parsley, lemon, pepper, nutmeg, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, bread, parsley, lemon, pepper, nutmeg, egg. 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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