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How to Warm Cold Meat

A method for gently warming sliced cold meat in a gravy made from bone broth, onion, and optional seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

How to Warm Cold Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the cold meat neatly and set aside.

  2. Place the bone in a pot with enough cold water to cover it and add the sliced onion.

  3. Cook gently for 2 hours.

  4. Strain the liquid and return it to the stove.

Make the gravy

  1. Add cold gravy (if available), salt, pepper, and your choice of seasoning.

  2. If no cold gravy is available, add a piece of butter instead.

  3. Thicken the mixture with flour mixed with cold water and bring to a boil while stirring constantly.

  4. For cold beef, add 1 tablespoon of ketchup to the gravy; for cold mutton, add 1 tablespoon of currant jelly.

Serve

  1. Add the slices of cold meat and simmer until warmed through.

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. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Meat + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,533 recipes

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth gravy when stirred and brought to a boil.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the gravy, used in place of cold gravy.
Onion
Adds savory aroma and flavor to the liquid simmered with the bone.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with flour mixed with cold water and bring to a boil while stirring constantly. Flour mixed with cold water disperses without lumps; constant stirring keeps starch granules from clumping, and boiling activates the starch so the gravy thickens smoothly.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, onion, pepper, flour, butter, ketchup, beef):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, onion, pepper, flour, butter, ketchup, beef. 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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