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Minced Meat on Toast

A savory dish of minced meat simmered with butter, flour, stock, and spices, served over toasted bread, optionally topped with a soft-poached egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,324 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Minced Meat on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the meat mixture

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan until slightly browned.

  2. Add the flour and stir to form a smooth paste.

  3. Gradually add the stock (or water) and seasonings, stirring well.

  4. Add the minced meat and cook slowly for about 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the mixture on slices of crisp toast, topped with a soft-poached egg if desired.

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. Nutmeg + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Browns slightly in the pan, adding a nutty, toasted flavour and richness to the base.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth paste that gives the mixture body.
Minced meat
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender as it cooks slowly in the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter to a smooth paste. Flour must be cooked briefly in the fat and stirred well before liquid is added; otherwise it clumps and the sauce turns lumpy instead of smooth.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, butter, flour, pepper, nutmeg, bread, egg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, flour, pepper, nutmeg, bread, egg. 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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