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Preserve

Potted Meat or Fish

A dish of cooked meat or fish mashed with butter and cayenne, then stored in clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Meat and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,594 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Potted Meat or Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cook the meat until tender, then finely scrape and rub it through a wire sieve.

  2. Pound the meat in a mortar, adding 4 ounces of butter and 5 to 10 grains of cayenne pepper for every pound of meat.

Pot and seal

  1. Place the meat into small pots or jars and cover with clarified butter.

  2. To make clarified butter, melt it gently in a stewpan until it becomes a transparent oil.

  3. Allow the clarified butter to cool slightly before pouring it over the meat to avoid greasiness.

  4. Store the pots in a cool, dry place.

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 + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,777 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the meat with fat, giving it a smooth, spreadable texture and rich flavour.
Cayenne pepper
Adds a light, warm heat that seasons the meat without dominating it.

The step that matters

Cooling the clarified butter before pouring. Clarified butter that is still very hot can soak into the meat and make the surface greasy. Letting it cool slightly helps it settle as a clean seal over the top.

“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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