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Meat Cakes

Ground meat cakes made with pork, bread, egg, onion juice, parsley, salt, pepper, flour, and fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Meat Cakes

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Meat Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. In a bowl, combine the ground cold meat, ground pork, soaked bread, and egg.

  2. Season with onion juice, parsley, coarse sea salt, and pepper.

  3. Add enough flour to thicken the mixture.

Fry

  1. Shape the mixture into cakes.

  2. Fry the cakes in hot lard until brown.

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

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

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  3. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Meat + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,208 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Ground cold meat
Forms the bulk of the cakes and gives them their main meaty flavor.
Ground pork
Adds fat and moisture so the cakes stay tender rather than dry.
Bread
Soaked and squeezed, it adds moisture and softness that keeps the mixture light.
Egg
Binds the mixture together so the cakes hold their shape while frying.
Flour
Thickens the mixture so it can be shaped into cakes that hold together.

The step that matters

Fry the cakes in hot lard until brown. The lard must be hot enough to brown the outside quickly. Frying in cool fat lets the cakes soak up grease and fall apart before a browned crust forms.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pork, bread, egg, parsley, pepper, flour. 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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