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Beaver— Roast

A roast made from a dressed beaver, brined, parboiled, and roasted with spices and a mustard‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Beaver— Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut your roast from any part of the dressed beaver.

  2. Make a strong brine and pour it over the meat.

  3. Let the meat stand in the brine overnight.

Parboil

  1. Cover the meat with cold water in a kettle.

  2. Add whole peppercorns, cloves, cinnamon, allspice, and mustard seed tied in cheesecloth.

  3. Parboil for half an hour.

Roast

  1. Transfer to a dripping pan with 1 pint of water and start roasting in the oven.

  2. Mix mustard, black pepper, cayenne, and flour with water from the dripping pan.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Beaver
Provides the meat that is cut into a roast and cooked through.
Flour
Thickens the pan liquid into a light gravy when mixed in.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour to the pan sauce.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, clove, cinnamon, allspice, pepper, flour):

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Carrotfits about as well
  3. Arrowrootfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, clove, cinnamon, allspice, 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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