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Mock Brawn

Mock Brawn is a boiled meat dish made from feet and pork, wrapped and served with a bran-based liquor.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 meat

  1. Boil the neat's feet until very tender.

  2. Remove the meat from the feet.

  3. Boil the salted belly piece of pork until almost done, then remove any bones.

  4. Roll the meat from the feet and the pork together tightly.

Press and cook

  1. Wrap it securely with a strong cloth and coarse tape.

  2. Boil the wrapped meat until very tender.

  3. Hang it up in the cloth until cold.

Make the sousing liquor

  1. For the sousing liquor, boil the wheat bran, bay, and rosemary in 2 gallons of water with 4 ounces of salt for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture and let it cool.

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

Neat's feet
Their gelatinous connective tissue sets as it cools, helping bind the brawn together.
Belly piece of pork
Adds fat and meaty flavour, and its salt cure firms the texture of the meat.
Salt
Seasons the meat and the sousing liquor, and helps preserve the pork.

The step that matters

Rolling and wrapping the meat tightly. Compacting the warm meat and fixing it firmly in cloth lets the gelatine bind the pieces into one solid mass as it cools. Loose wrapping leaves gaps and a crumbly result.

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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