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Meat with Eggs

A dish of finely minced roast meat cooked with onion, butter, flour, stock, herbs, and served with poached eggs over fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Meat with Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Trim fat from cold roast meat and mince it very fine.

Make the filling

  1. Fry the chopped onion in plenty of butter until light brown.

  2. Add flour and a little stock or gravy, then the minced meat, parsley, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Mix well.

  3. Add more stock if necessary; heat gradually on the back of the range.

  4. Add a few drops of lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve on fried squares of bread with a poached egg on top, or serve the meat in the center with poached eggs over it and toasted bread around.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold roast meat
Forms the main body of the dish, minced fine so it heats evenly into a spread.
Butter
Fat for frying the onion, adding richness and browning it lightly.
Flour
Thickens the stock or gravy so the minced meat holds together.
Stock or gravy
Supplies moisture so the mixture stays soft as it heats.
Eggs (in the method)
Poached on top, they set softly and add richness when cut into the meat.

The step that matters

Heat gradually on the back of the range. Gentle, gradual heat keeps the minced meat moist and tender. Fast or high heat can dry it out or make the thickened stock catch and scorch on the base of the pan.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, butter, flour, parsley, pepper, nutmeg, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, flour, parsley, pepper, nutmeg, lemon. 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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