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Mock Brawn

A dish made by boiling ox feet and salted pork, then mixing with wheat bran, bay, rosemary, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 meats

  1. Boil the ox-feet until tender.

  2. Remove the meat from the ox-feet.

  3. Boil the salted belly piece of pork separately until tender.

  4. Remove the bones from the pork and roll it tightly with the ox-feet.

  5. Boil both together until tender.

  6. Hang the mixture in cloth until cold.

Make the liquid

  1. In a pot, boil the wheat bran, bay, rosemary, and salt in 2 gallons of water for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the liquid and let it cool before using.

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

Ox-feet
Their gelatin-rich meat and collagen help the finished mock brawn set firm when cooled.
Belly piece of pork
Adds fat and meaty body, so the set mixture is richer and more tender to eat.
Wheat bran
Simmered in the water to add flavour and body to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Hang the mixture in cloth until cold. The meats must cool fully while held firmly together so the gelatin from the feet can set and bind them into a sliceable mass.

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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