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Meat Cakes

Meat cakes are small patties made from minced cold meat, optional bacon or ham, seasoned with pepper and salt, fried or baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Meat Cakes

Why it works: Meat and anchovy work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 335 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Meat Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Finely mince the cold meat, game, or poultry with a little fat bacon or ham, or an anchovy.

  2. Season the mixture with pepper and coarse sea salt, and mix well.

Form and cook

  1. Form the mixture into small cakes, each three inches long, one and a half inches wide, and half an inch thick.

  2. Fry the cakes in a pan until they are light brown.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat cakes with good gravy, or place them in a mold and boil or bake.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Meat + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together335 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Meat + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

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

  3. Ham + anchovytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together256 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Anchovy + peppertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,777 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

Cold meat, game, or poultry
Forms the main body of the cakes, so it sets the flavor and texture.
Fat bacon or ham
Adds fat that keeps the minced meat moist and carries flavor.

The step that matters

Frying the cakes until light brown. Cooked meat is already done, so the goal is surface browning without drying the inside. Browning comes from the Maillard reaction, which needs a hot, dry surface. Too low heat leaves the cakes pale and soft, while too much heat scorches the outside before the center warms through.

“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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