Name: Potted Meats
Ingredients: tender roasted meat (free of fat, skin, and gristle); cold fresh butter (or clarified butter); spices (optional)

Why it works: Meat and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,594 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Potted Meats

Ingredients

tender roasted meat (free of fat, skin, and gristle)
cold fresh butter (or clarified butter)
spices (optional)

Directions

Prepare

Take tender, well-roasted meat and remove all fat, skin, and gristle.

Make the paste

Pound the meat into a smooth paste.
Mix the meat with cold fresh butter until well combined.
Add spices if desired.

Store

Store in a cool place for preservation.

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 + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,594 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Tender roasted meat: Forms the bulk of the spread and gives it its meaty flavor and body.
Cold fresh butter: Adds fat that makes the paste smooth, rich, and spreadable.

“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.