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Beef Cakes for a Corner Dish

Beef cakes made from underdone beef, bacon or ham, spices, shallot or garlic, and a raw egg, fried and served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,019 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Beef Cakes for a Corner Dish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pound the underdone beef with the bacon or ham.

  2. Season with pepper, salt, nutmeg, shallot, or garlic. Mix well and bind with the raw egg.

  3. Form into small cakes.

Cook and serve

  1. Fry in oil until light brown.

  2. Serve with rich gravy.

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. Nutmeg + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + shallottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Beef + shallottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,103 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

Underdone beef
Forms the main body of the cakes and gives them their meaty flavour and texture.
Raw egg
Binds the mixture together so the cakes hold their shape when formed and fried.
Bacon or ham
Adds salty, savoury fat that enriches the flavour and moisture of the beef.

The step that matters

Fry in oil until light brown. Frying over steady heat browns the surface through the Maillard reaction, building flavour, while the raw egg inside must cook through. Too hot a pan browns the outside before the centre sets.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, ham, pepper, nutmeg, egg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits about as well
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, ham, pepper, nutmeg, egg. 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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