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Modern Cookery

Boiled head of meat served hot with optional sauces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Meat and ham are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,095 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the head

  1. Place the head in a pot and cover with cold water.

  2. Simmer gently for 1 hour and 15 minutes to 1 hour and 45 minutes until extremely tender.

Serve and keep

  1. Remove the head and serve hot with curry sauce, oyster sauce, or egg sauce and brown gravy.

  2. If saving for later, do not pour gravy over it and leave the binding on for several hours.

  3. For added flavor, boil the gravy until reduced and jellied when cold, optionally adding a bone of ham or slice of hung beef.

  4. Avoid vegetables if you want to keep the gravy.

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. Meat + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Oyster + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sauce + oystertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Egg + hamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,526 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Head of meat
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender and rich through long simmering.
Calf's foot
Optional; its natural gelatin helps the gravy set into a jelly when cold.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until extremely tender. Boiling hard can toughen and break up the meat, while slow simmering breaks down connective tissue and collagen so it becomes tender.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, sauce, oyster, egg, ham):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Celeryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, sauce, oyster, egg, ham. 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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