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Pressed Beef

A dish of boiled shin of beef, shredded and pressed into a mold, served cold or warm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Pressed Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. Boil the shin of beef until it falls off the bone.

  2. Remove the meat from the pot.

Prepare the meat and liquid

  1. Pick the meat into pieces, mashing the gristle finely.

  2. Discard any hard bits.

  3. Set the cooking liquid aside to cool.

  4. Remove the fat from the liquid.

  5. Boil the liquid down to 1½ pints.

Press and serve

  1. Return the meat to the hot liquid, adding pepper, salt, and spices. Boil a few times while stirring.

  2. Pour into a mold or deep dish to cool.

  3. Serve cold, sliced thin for tea, or warm for breakfast.

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. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Shin of beef
Provides the meat and connective tissue that break down into gelatin, helping the mixture set when cooled.

The step that matters

Remove the fat from the liquid. Fat left in the cooking liquid can keep the pressed beef greasy and can interfere with a clean set, so it should be skimmed off after the liquid cools and the fat rises.

“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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