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Meat Porcupine

A sausage‑like dish made from beef, ham, pork, and spices, formed into an oval, browned, then braised in stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Meat Porcupine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Pass the beef steak, ham, and pork through a sausage machine.

  2. Add salt, pepper, mixed spices, onion, parsley, thyme, and basil to the meat mixture and blend well.

  3. Beat the egg with ½ cup of strong warm stock.

  4. Add the beaten egg mixture to the meat mixture and form into an oval shape.

  5. Once cold and firm, lard the meat thickly with bacon.

Brown and cook

  1. Heat oil or butter in a pan and brown the meat for 10 minutes.

  2. Pour off the fat.

  3. Add ½ pint of stock and cook gently for 1.5 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken and season the gravy.

  2. Pour the gravy around the meat on a hot dish.

  3. Garnish with scraped horseradish.

  4. Serve with sauces for dark meats.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + basiltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

  3. Parsley + basiltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  5. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef steak
Provides the main body of the meat, giving the porcupine its substance and bite.
Lean ham
Adds savoury flavour and a firmer texture to the meat mixture.
Fat pork
Adds fat that keeps the mixture moist and juicy during cooking.
Egg
Binds the minced meat so the mixture holds its oval shape.
Bacon
Larded into the surface, it adds fat and savoury flavour that baste the meat as it cooks.
Stock
Gently simmers the meat and forms the base of the gravy.

The step that matters

Forming and chilling before larding. The meat must be cold and firm before larding, otherwise the bacon strips will not hold and the shape can collapse. Chilling lets the fat and proteins set so the oval keeps its form during browning and simmering.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, ham, pork, pepper, parsley, thyme, basil):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, ham, pork, pepper, parsley, thyme, basil. 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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