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Deviled Meat

A savory dish of chopped cold cooked meat mixed with butter, bread crumbs, egg, mustard, and spices, served hot over buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Deviled Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the cold cooked meat into small pieces.

Make the filling

  1. Melt the butter and add the stale bread crumbs, then fry until golden brown.

  2. Stir in the chopped meat, ground egg, mustard, salt, and red pepper, then heat until hot.

  3. Add the mashed egg yolks and stock or water, then bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve hot over buttered toast.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  3. Meat + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together855 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked meat
Forms the bulk of the filling and supplies its savory flavor.
Stale bread crumbs
Absorb fat and liquid, thickening the mixture and giving it body.
Egg yolks
Enrich the mixture and help bind it into a smooth, creamy texture.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the crumbs brown when fried.
Stock or water
Adds moisture so the mixture loosens into a spreadable consistency.

The step that matters

Fry the bread crumbs until golden brown. Frying toasts the crumbs in butter, developing nutty browning flavor. Crumbs pulled too early taste raw and pasty, while over-browned ones turn bitter.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, butter, bread, egg, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, bread, egg, pepper. 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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