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Mock Meat

A patty made from milk, butter, bread crumbs, flour, sugar, eggs, walnuts, and onion juice, simmered in boiling water and served with a walnut‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 ↓

Mock Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. In a saucepan, heat the milk and butter until boiling.

  2. Stir in the bread crumbs, flour, and sugar.

  3. Cook until it no longer sticks to the pan, then remove from heat.

  4. Let it cool, then add the eggs one at a time, beating until smooth.

  5. Mix in the chopped walnuts, salt, pepper, and onion juice.

Shape and cook the cakes

  1. Form into flat cakes about ½ inch thick, dust with flour.

  2. Cook in boiling salted water for 3-4 minutes, then drain.

  3. Dust with flour again and brown in hot butter in a skillet.

Make the gravy

  1. In another skillet, combine flour, butter, and chopped walnuts. Brown together.

  2. Stir in strained vegetable stock until the gravy thickens to the consistency of cream.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and set when cooked, giving the cakes structure.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and butter to form a firm, shapeable base.
Milk
Moistens the crumb base so it can be cooked into a smooth mixture.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the cakes brown in the skillet.
Flour
Thickens the mixture and the gravy, and helps the cakes brown on the outside.

The step that matters

Cook the panada until it no longer sticks to the pan. Cooking the crumb and milk mixture drives off excess moisture and gelatinizes the starch, so the mixture firms up. If it is undercooked, the cakes stay wet and may fall apart when boiled or browned.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Beansfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, bread, flour, sugar, 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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