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Pork, Hashed

A dish of sliced pork and onions cooked with flour, mace, vinegar, and gravy, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Pork, Hashed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the onions and fry them until golden brown.

  2. Cut the pork into thin slices and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Stew and serve

  1. Add the pork to the onions along with the remaining ingredients.

  2. Stew gently for about 30 minutes.

  3. Garnish with toasted bread slices.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Pork
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and absorbs the flavour of the stew.
Onions
Frying to golden brown adds sweetness and a deep savoury base to the stew.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it clings to the pork and onions.
Gravy
Supplies the liquid that keeps the meat moist during stewing.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury flavours.
Mace
Contributes a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the stew.

The step that matters

Stew gently for about 30 minutes. A gentle simmer lets the pork warm through and soften without tightening its proteins. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can break up the thickened gravy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, onion, flour, clove, vinegar, pepper):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, onion, flour, clove, vinegar, pepper. 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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