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Mince Meat

A fruit and spice-studded minced tongue dish with suet, wine, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Mince Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Boil the tongue until tender, then skin and chop it finely.

Combine the mincemeat

  1. In a large bowl, combine the chopped tongue, raisins, currants, apples, lemon rind, and lemon juice.

  2. Add the sugar, mace, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, wine, brandy, and suet to the mixture. Mix thoroughly until all ingredients are well combined.

  3. Add sliced citron to taste and mix again.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  4. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy body, and plump as they absorb the wine and brandy.
Currants
Add concentrated fruit flavour and a soft, chewy texture throughout the filling.
Apples
Add moisture and tartness that balances the sugar and dried fruit.
Suet
Adds richness and fat that carries spice flavour and keeps the filling moist.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps preserve it along with the spirits.
Brandy
Adds aroma and helps preserve the mixture.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, currant, apple, lemon, sugar, clove, cinnamon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, currant, apple, lemon, sugar, clove, cinnamon. 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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