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Mock Brawn

A boiled pork dish made from feet and salted belly, wrapped in cloth and served with a bran, bay, and rosemary broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and rosemary share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 44 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Mock Brawn

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Boil the neat's feet until very tender.

  2. Remove the meat from the feet.

  3. Boil the salted belly piece of pork until almost cooked.

  4. Remove any bones from the pork.

  5. Roll the meat from the feet and the pork together tightly.

Shape and cook

  1. Wrap it in a strong cloth and secure with coarse tape.

  2. Boil the wrapped meat until very tender.

  3. Hang it up in the cloth until cold.

Make the sousing liquor

  1. For the sousing liquor, boil the wheat bran, bay, and rosemary in water with salt for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture and let it cool.

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. Wheat + rosemarytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together44 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Pork + wheattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together213 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Pork + rosemarytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together656 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Neat's feet
Their gelatin-rich meat and connective tissue set the brawn firm when cooled.
Belly piece of pork
Adds fat and savoury meat flavour, giving the brawn moisture and body as it cooks.
Salt
Seasons the meat and, with the salted pork, helps preserve and flavour the brawn.

The step that matters

Boil the wrapped meat until very tender. Connective tissue in the feet must break down fully into gelatin, or the cooled brawn will not set firmly and will feel tough and rubbery.

Swap the rosemary

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, wheat):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Rosemarythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, wheat. 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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