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Meat Sanders

A pastry square filled with chopped cold meat or bacon, soaked bread crusts, onion, pepper, salt, and dripping, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Meat Sanders

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Chop the cold meat or bacon.

  2. Mix with soaked bread crusts, chopped onion, pepper, and salt.

Assemble and bake

  1. Make potato pastry, roll it to 1 inch thick, and cut into squares.

  2. Place some meat mixture in each square, wet the edges, and fold over.

  3. Bake on a greased tin for 30 minutes.

  4. Serve hot.

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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  2. Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

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

  3. Bread + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

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

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Meat + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,364 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
Provides the main savoury filling of the sandwiches.
Soaked bread crusts
Adds moisture and binds the filling together.
Dripping
Greases the tin so the pastry does not stick and browns lightly.
Flour
Forms the structure of the potato pastry that encloses the filling.

The step that matters

Wetting and sealing the edges. Water on the pastry edges helps them bond when folded, so the filling stays sealed in during baking instead of leaking out.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, bread, pepper, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, bread, pepper, flour. 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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