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Baking Meat

A pork leg or bullock's heart baked with buttered paper and beef gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and beef match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Baking Meat

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Place the heart or leg of pork in a stand in a deep dish, point downwards.

Bake

  1. Cover the meat with a piece of buttered writing paper to keep the stuffing moist.

  2. Bake until thoroughly cooked, basting occasionally with beef gravy.

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. Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

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

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

  3. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 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 leg
The main cut of meat that is cooked through in the oven.
Beef gravy
Moistens the surface during baking, adding flavour and helping keep the meat juicy.
Butter
Greases the paper cover so it lies on the meat without sticking.

The step that matters

Bake until thoroughly cooked, basting occasionally with beef gravy. Pork must reach a fully cooked internal temperature to be safe, and the large cut heats slowly at the centre. Basting with gravy adds moisture to the surface while the paper cover slows drying, so the meat stays juicy rather than dry by the time the centre is cooked.

“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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