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Cold Meat Mince

A baked dish of beaten eggs, bread, cooked meat, vegetables, and ketchup, topped with a sauce made from meat bones, onion, carrot, turnip, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cold Meat Mince

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare and bake

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Beat one egg and mix it with the chopped meat and bread.

  3. Butter a deep pudding dish well inside.

  4. Cut a hard-boiled egg into small pieces and decorate the bottom and sides of the dish neatly.

  5. Press the meat mixture into the dish and bake for 1 hour.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the bones of the meat with an onion, carrot, and turnip for 2 hours to make the sauce.

  2. In a pan, fry a chopped onion in ½ ounce of butter until brown.

  3. Sprinkle in 2 teaspoons of flour and stir until wet.

  4. Add ½ pint of the stock, 1 tablespoon of ketchup, and pepper and salt to taste.

  5. Stir until it boils, but do not let it thicken.

Serve

  1. Strain the sauce around the meat and 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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the meat mixture and set firm as it bakes.
Bread
Soaks up liquid and keeps the meat mixture soft and moist.
Milk
Adds moisture and softens the bread for a tender mixture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps the onion turn brown.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir until it boils, but do not let it thicken.. Flour thickens liquid as its starch swells with heat, so the sauce can become too thick if it is kept boiling or left too long. Stirring while it heats keeps it smooth and lump-free.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, bread, milk, meat, carrot, turnip, ketchup):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, bread, milk, meat, carrot, turnip, ketchup. 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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