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Very Good Minced Pies

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,621 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Very Good Minced Pies

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash and pick the raisins and currants, stoning the raisins.

  2. Chop the raisins, currants, preserved citron, and ginger very fine.

  3. Mix all chopped ingredients with sugar, lime juice, brandy, nutmeg, and beef.

  4. If using beef, add coarse sea salt; if using salt tongue, omit salt.

  5. Chop everything very fine and mix thoroughly.

  6. Let the mixture sit in an open vessel for a few days.

  7. Transfer to jars for storage.

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. Ginger + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,621 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Orange + limetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together937 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Orange + gingertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

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

  4. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Lime + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together236 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, orange, ginger, sugar, lime, brandy, nutmeg):

  1. Lemonbetter flavor fit
  2. Figbetter flavor fit
  3. Vanillabetter flavor fit
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, orange, ginger, sugar, lime, brandy, nutmeg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

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