Name: Stock for Good Gravies
Ingredients: same weight of meat; same weight of ham; vegetables; 1 quart cold water; 1 teaspoon extract of meat or a bit of glaze

Stock for Good Gravies

A stock made by simmering equal parts meat and ham with vegetables in cold water, then strained and finished with meat extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription

From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients

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 ↓

Stock for Good Gravies

Ingredients

Directions

Combine the meat, ham, and vegetables in a pot.
Add 1 quart of cold water and skim the surface.
Cover the pot and simmer for 3 to 4 hours.
Strain the stock, discarding the solids.
While hot, stir in the extract of meat or glaze.

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.

Meat + hamtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,095 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Meat: Provides the main savory flavor and body of the stock.
Ham: Adds salty, savory depth to the stock.
Extract of meat or glaze: Concentrates savory meaty flavor and richness in the finished stock.

“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.