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To Roast a Cud’s Head

A roasted cud's head served with a sauce of butter, anchovy, liver, egg yolks, shrimps, port wine, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and mace match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 6,557 recipes mention both. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk, wheat, fish, shellfish (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the head

  1. Scrape the cleaned Cud's head and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  2. Place the head in a tin oven or stewpan before the fire, shielded from direct heat.

  3. After 30 minutes, drain off the water and season with nutmeg, cloves, beaten mace, and salt.

Roast

  1. Dust with flour and baste with melted butter, turning and basting frequently.

  2. If large, roast for 4 to 5 hours, adding bread crumbs as you baste.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a saucepan, melt butter and mix with the anchovy, liver, and beaten egg yolks.

  2. Bring to a boil, strain, and return to the saucepan with shrimps or cockles, port wine, and lemon juice.

  3. Simmer for 1-2 minutes, then pour the sauce over the roasted head in a dish.

  4. Serve hot.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Nutmeg + macetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + macetop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,199 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Butter + breadtop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,145 recipes

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

  5. Bread + anchovytop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together1,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and bind it into a smooth, rich emulsion.
Butter
Adds richness and fat for basting, helping the head brown and stay moist.
Bread crumbs
Add body to the roast as they absorb basting fat and brown on the surface.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce and balances its fat.
Anchovy
Contributes a savoury, salty depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer the sauce gently after adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat; if the sauce boils hard or simmers too long after the yolks go in, they can scramble and curdle, leaving the sauce grainy instead of smooth.

Flavor stand-ins for the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (nutmeg, mace, butter, bread, egg, anchovy, liver):

  1. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  2. Cinnamonabout as good a flavor fit
  3. Thymeabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against nutmeg, mace, butter, bread, egg, anchovy, liver. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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