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Meat Cakes

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Meat Cakes

Why it works: Ham and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,536 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Meat Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Finely mince the cold meat with a little fat bacon or ham, or an anchovy.

  2. Season the mixture with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Mix well and shape into small cakes, each three inches long, one and a half inches wide, and half an inch thick.

  4. Fry the cakes until they are light brown.

  5. Serve with good gravy, or place in a mold and boil or bake them.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  2. Anchovy + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,260 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Anchovy + eggtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,330 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Meat + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together335 recipes

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

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

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, ham, anchovy, pepper, bread, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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