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Excellent Meat Rolls

Meat rolls made from roasted meat, butter, forcemeat, and optional ingredients, wrapped in puff pastry and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Excellent Meat Rolls

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Pound the half-roasted meat with butter and seasonings.

  2. Make forcemeat according to the specified recipe.

Form and wrap

  1. Form small rolls, no larger than a finger, from the meat.

  2. Moisten each roll with 1 teaspoon of water.

  3. Wrap the rolls in puff pastry.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 15 to 20 minutes, until the crust is golden.

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 + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Butter + oystertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  3. Oyster + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together360 recipes

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

  4. Veal + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Oyster + saucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat that keeps the pounded meat tender and moist as it cooks.
Roasted veal, chicken, or turkey
Provides the main body and savory flavor of each roll.
Oysters
Adds a briny, savory flavor to the filling.

The step that matters

Baking the wrapped rolls. Puff pastry browns quickly, and its layers rise from steam in the dough. Watch the rolls closely so the crust turns golden before the lean filling dries out.

“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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