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An Excellent Padding From Cold Roast Beef

A filling made from minced cold roast beef, salt, flour, pepper, water, and optional aromatics, boiled until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

An Excellent Padding From Cold Roast Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mince the cold roast beef.

  2. Mix the minced beef with salt, flour, and pepper.

Fill and cook

  1. Fill the paste with the prepared meat and add water.

  2. Add chopped onions and parsley if desired.

  3. Cover and tie in a cloth.

  4. Boil for 30 minutes or longer if the paste is thick.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + walnuttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together865 recipes

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

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold roast beef
Provides the meat that forms the filling and gives it its main flavour and body.
Flour
Thickens the mixture and helps bind the minced meat into a paste.

The step that matters

Boil for 30 minutes or longer if the paste is thick. A thick paste takes longer for heat to reach its centre, so extra boiling time helps it cook through evenly. Checking thickness and extending the time keeps the meat from staying underdone in the middle.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, pepper, parsley, walnut, mushroom, vinegar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, pepper, parsley, walnut, mushroom, vinegar. 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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