Name: To Clarify Butter for Potting or Frying, and Suet and Dripping for Frying
Ingredients: butter; mutton suet; beef suet; lard

Why it works: Mutton and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,373 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Clarify Butter for Potting or Frying, and Suet and Dripping for Frying

Ingredients

butter
mutton suet
beef suet
lard

Directions

Cut the butter into slices and place it in a jar.
Set the jar in a pan of boiling water and let it melt and heat.
Skim off the foam, then pour the melted butter gently into another container, leaving the sediment behind.
Roughly chop the suet and lard, removing all skin and fibrous parts.
Melt the suet and lard slowly over low heat or in a Dutch oven, collecting the fat as it drips.
Strain the melted fat and discard the sediment.

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.

Mutton + beeftop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,373 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + muttontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,781 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + beeftop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,847 recipes

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