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Hashed Meat

A dish of cold meat cooked with onion, carrot, and stock, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Hashed Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Put the bones into a saucepan, cover with cold water, and boil for 2 hours.

  2. Remove the bones and discard the fat from the stock.

Make the hash

  1. Fry the sliced onion in the dripping with the flour until brown.

  2. Add the stock from the bones, the finely chopped carrot, salt, and pepper; boil for 30 minutes.

  3. Add the sliced cold meat and let it simmer gently for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Serve on a hot dish and garnish with toasted bread slices.

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 + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 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

Cold meat
Forms the main body of the hash and is warmed through slowly in the stock.
Onion
Browns in the fat to add sweetness and savory depth to the sauce.
Dripping
Carries the frying heat and adds richness to the onion.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, lightly bound gravy when fried with the onion.

The step that matters

Frying the onion with the flour until brown. Browning the onion and flour develops deeper flavor through the Maillard reaction, but if the flour burns it turns bitter. Stir steadily and stop once golden brown.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, flour, pepper, carrot, nutmeg. 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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