Name: Boiled Meat
Ingredients: meat (beef); broth (from boiling meat)

Why it works: Meat and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,533 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Boiled Meat

Ingredients

meat (beef)
broth (from boiling meat)

Directions

Prepare

Boil a quantity of beef in water until three-fourths cooked.
Remove half of the meat.
Ensure the bones are taken off.
Strain the broth.

Bottle the broth

Let the broth cool.
Pour the cooled broth into bottles.
Cork the bottles tightly.
Wrap the bottles in bags.

Jar the meat and set in water

Place the removed meat in jars.
Fill the jars with some of the broth.
Cork the jars.
Tie the jars.
Wrap the jars in bags.
Put the bottles and jars upright in a caldron filled with cold water up to the rim.

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.

Meat + beeftop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,533 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef: Supplies the cooked meat that makes up the main body of the preserved food.
Broth: Carries moisture and savoury flavour through the bottled and jarred contents.

“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.