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To Make Savoury Jelly for Cold Meat

A gelatinous sauce made from beef and mutton, seasoned with pepper, salt, mace, onion, and egg whites, served over cold meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Make Savoury Jelly for Cold Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Boil beef and mutton until it forms a stiff jelly.

  2. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, mace, and onion.

  3. Beat the egg whites and add them to the jelly, mixing gently.

  4. Strain the mixture through a jelly bag until clear.

Serve

  1. Pour the clear jelly over your meat or fowl before serving.

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. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Beef + muttontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Breaks down during boiling to give the jelly its body and stiff set.
Mutton
Adds gelatin-rich meat to the stock, helping it set firm as it cools.
Egg whites
Coagulate and collect impurities so the jelly can be strained clear.

The step that matters

Adding the egg whites. Egg whites must be mixed in gently and then heated so they coagulate and trap cloudy particles. Stirring too hard breaks up the foam and the clarifying action is lost, leaving the jelly cloudy.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, mutton, pepper, onion, egg. 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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