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
Break the bones of the head and cover with cold water in a pot.
Simmer gently for 1 hour and 15 minutes to 1 hour and 45 minutes until extremely tender.
Serve
Remove the head and serve hot with curry sauce, oyster sauce, or egg sauce and brown gravy.
Keep and set
If saving for later, do not pour gravy over it and leave the binding on for several hours.
Boil the remaining gravy until well reduced and jellied when cold.
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.
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Meat + hamtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together1,095 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
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Meat + parsleytop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together3,040 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
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Ham + parsleytop 24% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together3,249 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
- Provides the main body, and its connective tissue softens into tender meat during long simmering.
- Cold water
- Cooking liquid that slowly draws gelatin from the bones and tissue into the gravy.
- Calf's foot
- Adds extra collagen, which gives the reduced gravy a firm, jellied set when cold.
The step that matters
Simmer gently, not hard. Long gentle simmering converts collagen in the head into gelatin, making the meat tender. A hard boil toughens muscle fibres and can break the meat apart while leaving the gravy cloudy.
Swap the parsley
The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, ham):
- Thymefits better
- Celeryfits better
- Clovefits about as well
- Parsleythe original
Fit is the average pairing score against meat, 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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