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A Hash of Cooked Calfs Head

A hash of cooked calf's head simmered in gravy with mushrooms, catsup, and lemon, finished with optional cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

A Hash of Cooked Calfs Head

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Combine the gravy, catsup, lemon juice, and mushrooms in a stewpan.

  2. Simmer until the mushrooms are tender.

  3. Thicken the mixture with flour, adding more if necessary.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the pieces of calf's head and simmer for 15 minutes.

  2. Garnish with fried or toasted bread and, if desired, egg and forcemeat balls.

  3. If using oysters instead of mushrooms, scald them and add to the gravy, straining the liquor to remove grit.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Calf's head
Cooked meat that forms the body of the hash, heated through in the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the meat and mushrooms rather than running thin.
Button mushrooms
Add earthy flavor and a tender texture to the gravy.
Gravy or stock
Provides the savory liquid base that carries the flavor of the whole dish.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with flour. Flour must be cooked in the hot liquid to avoid raw, pasty taste and lumps. Adding it gradually, and adding more only as needed, lets you control the thickness before the meat goes in.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, pepper, cream, flour):

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, pepper, cream, flour. 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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