Name: Potted Meat
Ingredients: 1 pound lean steak; ¼ pound butter; ½ teaspoon spice; Salt and pepper to taste

Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Potted Meat

Ingredients

1 pound lean steak
¼ pound butter
½ teaspoon spice
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
Place the steak in a dish and cook it in the oven until well done in its own juices.
Cut the cooked steak into small pieces.

Pound and pot

In a mortar, combine the steak pieces with butter and seasoning, and pound until well mixed.
Transfer the mixture into small pots and pour melted butter over the top.
If consuming soon, add the cooking gravy to the mixture.
If storing, omit the gravy and add more butter.

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.

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

Lean steak: Provides the main meat and savory flavor once cooked and pounded into the spread.
Butter: Adds richness and a smooth, spreadable texture while carrying flavor through the mixture.

“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.