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Braising Salt Meat

A braised salt meat dish cooked slowly with fat, onion, flour, water, and optional vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and meat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,364 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Braising Salt Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Brown the scraps of fat in a pot.

  2. Fry the sliced onion in the fat until golden.

  3. Add ½ cup of flour and mix smoothly with the fat.

  4. Pour in an equal measure of water to create a gravy.

Cook the stew

  1. Add the salt meat to the gravy and cover the pot.

  2. Cook slowly on the back of the stove until tender.

  3. Add vegetables if desired during the cooking process.

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. Onion + meattop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,364 recipes

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

  2. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + meattop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the water and fat into a smooth gravy.
Scraps of fat
Provides fat for frying the onion and adds richness to the gravy.
Salt meat
Supplies the main meat and seasoning of the stew.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour smoothly with the fat. Flour added to hot fat must be stirred well so it cooks evenly without lumps. Cooking the flour briefly in the fat removes its raw taste and lets it thicken the water evenly when added.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, meat. 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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