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Hash a LA Trovencale

A hearty hash of beef, mutton, pork, and bacon cooked slowly with onions, parsley, thyme, and pepper, served with sliced potatoes and optional vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Hash a LA Trovencale

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Hash together the beef, mutton, pork, bacon, parsley, onion, thyme, and pepper.

  2. Mold the mixture into a bowl shape.

Cook

  1. Place the molded mixture in a stew pan.

  2. Make a hole in the center to shape it like a crown.

  3. Cook slowly for 2 hours.

  4. Halfway through cooking, add the sliced potatoes and any optional vegetables around the crown.

  5. Arrange the vegetables around the crown.

Serve

  1. Remove excess fat 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  5. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides the main meaty body and savory flavor of the hash.
Mutton
Adds rich, distinctive meat flavor and fat that bastes the mixture as it cooks.
Fresh pork
Contributes fat and tenderness, helping the meat stay moist during slow cooking.
Bacon
Adds smoky, salty fat that flavors the meat and renders into the hash.
Potatoes
Add starch and bulk, absorbing savory juices and turning soft and hearty.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for 2 hours. Low, slow heat lets the tough collagen in the meats break down into gelatin, making the meat tender and moist. Cooking too fast can toughen the meat and dry it out.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, mutton, pork, parsley, thyme, pepper, potato):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Onionthe original
  4. Capsicumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, mutton, pork, parsley, thyme, pepper, potato. 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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