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Potted Dripping

A preserved fat made by boiling dripping, straining, and cooling 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 ↓

Potted Dripping

Ingredients

Directions

Clarify the dripping

  1. Boil the dripping in soft water.

  2. Strain the dripping into a pan.

  3. Let the pan cool.

  4. Remove the fat and scrape the gravy from the inside repeatedly.

Season and pot

  1. Put the fat into a saucepan with bay leaves, cloves, salt, and pepper.

  2. Melt the fat.

  3. When just hot, strain the melted fat into a pot.

  4. Let the pot cool.

  5. Cover the pot tightly.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Dripping
Forms the fat that carries the flavour and sets firm as it cools.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the fat and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Removing the gravy from the fat. Any leftover water or meat residue in the fat can spoil it over time, so the fat should be cleaned by repeated boiling, straining, and scraping before it is potted.

“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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