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Rotted Dripping, for Frying Fish, Meat, Fritters, &C.

A method for rendering beef dripping with bay leaves, cloves, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Rotted Dripping, for Frying Fish, Meat, Fritters, &C.

Ingredients

Directions

Clean the fat

  1. Roil the beef dripping in soft water and strain it into a pan.

  2. Let it stand until cold, then remove the hard fat and scrape off the gravy. Repeat this process several times.

Melt and flavour

  1. Once cold and hard, clean it from the water and place it in a large saucepan.

  2. Add bay leaves, cloves, salt, and whole pepper.

  3. Melt the fat completely, then let it cool slightly before straining through a sieve into a pot.

Store

  1. Let it cool completely, then cover it and turn the pot upside down to keep vermin out.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  3. Beef + clovetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef dripping
Forms the fat that is cleaned, melted and preserved, carrying the flavour of the other ingredients.
Cloves
Adds a warm aroma that the melted fat takes up as it stands.
Bay leaves
Adds a mild herbal aroma to the melted fat.

The step that matters

Melt the fat completely, then strain it. Melting fully and straining while liquid removes remaining water, gravy residue and solids. These can make rendered fat spoil or turn rancid during storage, so the strained fat must be clean and dry.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper):

  1. Rosemaryfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper. 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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