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Pigs Cheek Boiled

A boiled pork cheek served with onion sauce, green vegetables, and apple sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,214 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Pigs Cheek Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and scrape the skin of the pork cheek thoroughly, removing any hair.

  2. Take out the eye and rub the cheek well with coarse sea salt; set aside until needed.

  3. Wash the cheek again and place it in a large saucepan with plenty of cold water.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the cheek until tender, about two hours, until it slips easily off a skewer.

  2. Lift the cheek and place it on a hot dish; serve with onion sauce, green vegetables, and apple sauce.

  3. The leftover cooking liquid can be used for soup; add salt to preserve it.

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. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

  2. Pork + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Onion + appletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,206 recipes

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

  4. Onion + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Pork + saucetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Onion and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,474 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Pork cheek
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long gentle boiling.
Coarse sea salt
Rubbed into the surface to season the meat and draw out moisture before cooking.

The step that matters

Boiling until tender. Pork cheek is a tough, collagen-rich cut. It needs a long, gentle simmer so the collagen softens into gelatin; a hard rolling boil can toughen the meat and leave it stringy.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, onion, sauce):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, onion, sauce. 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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