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A boiled head of meat served with currie sauce, oyster sauce, egg sauce, or brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Meat and ham are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,095 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place the broken head in a pot and cover with cold water.

  2. Simmer gently for 1 hour and 15 minutes to 1 hour and 45 minutes until extremely tender.

  3. Remove the head and serve hot with currie sauce, oyster sauce, egg sauce, or brown gravy.

  4. If saving for later use, do not pour gravy over it and leave the binding on for several hours.

  5. To enhance the flavor, boil the gravy until well reduced and jellied when cold, adding optional ingredients if desired.

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

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

  2. Oyster + hamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together360 recipes

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

  3. Oyster + eggtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

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

  4. Sauce + oystertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Egg + hamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,526 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

Meat head
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender and gelatinous during long simmering.
Cold water
Provides the cooking liquid that gently extracts flavor and gelatin from the bones and meat.

The step that matters

Simmering gently until extremely tender. Boiling hard can toughen and break up the meat, while gentle simmering lets collagen in the connective tissue slowly convert to gelatin, giving tenderness and a jellied gravy.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, sauce, oyster, egg, ham):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Celeryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, sauce, oyster, egg, ham. 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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