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An Excellent Padding From Cold Roast Beef

A boiled paste of cold roast beef seasoned with salt, flour, pepper, and optional aromatics.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

An Excellent Padding From Cold Roast Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Mince the cold roast beef.

  2. Add salt, flour, and pepper; mix well.

Fill and tie

  1. Fill the paste with the prepared meat and add water.

  2. Optionally, add chopped onions and parsley.

  3. Cover and tie in a cloth.

Boil

  1. Boil for 30 minutes or longer if the paste is thick.

  2. Optionally, add chopped gherkins, pickled walnuts, mushrooms, or vinegar from pickles.

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

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

  2. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + walnuttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together865 recipes

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

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold roast beef
Provides the main meat filling and its savory flavor.
Flour
Thickens the mixture so it holds together as it cooks.
Water
Adds moisture so the meat cooks gently while boiling.

The step that matters

Boil for 30 minutes or longer if the paste is thick. Heat must reach the center of the thick paste and meat. Thick mixtures conduct heat slowly, so under-boiling can leave the middle undercooked and the texture uneven.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, pepper, parsley, walnut, mushroom, vinegar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, pepper, parsley, walnut, mushroom, vinegar. 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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