Skip to main content
Main

Dr. Ratclif's Restorative Pork Jelly

A gelatinous pork broth made by simmering a pork leg with spices and water, then cooling and removing fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Dr. Ratclif's Restorative Pork Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Beat the leg of pork and break the bone.

  2. Set it over gentle heat with 3 gallons of water.

Make the aspic

  1. Simmer until reduced to 1 gallon.

  2. Add mace and nutmeg, and stew in the mixture.

  3. Strain through a fine sieve.

  4. When cold, remove the fat.

Serve

  1. Serve a cupful at the beginning and end of the day, adding salt to taste.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Pork + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,565 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Pork + nutmegtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,825 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Pork leg
Supplies collagen and gelatin, which set the liquid into a jelly as it cools.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the broth.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, sweet aroma that complements the spice in the broth.

The step that matters

Simmer until reduced to 1 gallon. Reducing the broth concentrates its flavour and gelatin. If it is too thin, it will not set into a firm aspic when cold.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, mace):

  1. Nutmegthe original
  2. Clovefits about as well
  3. Allspicefits less well
  4. Marjoramfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, mace. 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.

You might also like

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes