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Hashed Pork

A pork hash cooked with onions, butter, stock, and vinegar, served on toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Hashed Pork

Oven, in the book's wordsA gentle oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Fry the sliced onions in the butter until soft.

  3. Add the pork slices, salt, and pepper, and stir well.

  4. Pour in the stock and stew gently for 1 hour.

  5. Add a few drops of vinegar before serving.

  6. Serve the hashed pork in slices of toasted bread.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Pork
Provides the main body of the dish, becoming tender as it stews slowly in liquid.
Stock
Supplies the liquid that moistens the pork and carries flavour during the gentle stew.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour when it melts and fries the onions.
Onions
Soften in butter to add sweetness and savoury aroma to the base of the hash.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 1 hour. Low, gentle heat over a long time breaks down the connective tissue in pork, making it tender. Boiling hard would toughen the meat and reduce the stock too quickly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, butter, pepper, vinegar, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, butter, pepper, vinegar, bread. 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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