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Preserve

To Boil Meats, &C

A method for boiling meat using cold water and gradual heating.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Meat and mutton work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 936 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

To Boil Meats, &C

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place the meat in a pot with cold water, using 1 quart for every pound of meat.

  2. Cover the pot and gradually heat the water over moderate heat, skimming off any scum that rises to the top as the water heats.

  3. Once the water reaches a boil, reduce the heat to maintain a gentle boil.

  4. Cook the meat according to its weight, starting the timing when the water first boils.

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. Meat + muttontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together936 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Is the main item cooked; its size and weight set the cooking time.

The step that matters

Start cooking time at the first boil. Starting the clock when the water first boils keeps the timing accurate. Boiling too hard can toughen the meat and make the liquid cloudy, so a gentle simmer is used.

“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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