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Potting Meats and Fish

A preserved meat and fish mixture packed in clarified butter and seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Potting Meats and Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cook the meat until tender.

  2. Scrape the meat finely and rub it through a wire sieve.

Make the potted meat

  1. Pound the meat in a mortar with 4 ounces of clarified butter.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and pepper to taste.

  3. Pack the mixture into jars and pour clarified butter over the top.

Store

  1. Store in a cool 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

Cooked meat
Forms the body of the paste, providing the savoury base of the dish.
Clarified butter
Adds richness and moisture, and when poured on top it seals the surface against air.

“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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