Name: Hashed Meat on Toast
Ingredients: 2 cups chopped meat; ½ pint soup stock or gravy; boiling water; 1 tablespoon butter; salt to taste; pepper to taste; 6 small slices of bread

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Hashed Meat on Toast

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hash

Combine chopped meat, soup stock or gravy, boiling water, and melted butter in a pot.
Season with salt and pepper and mix well.
Cover the pot and simmer for 30 minutes.

Serve

Toast the bread slices until golden brown.
Arrange the toasted bread on a warm platter and spread the hash over the top.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Meat + breadtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,924 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,594 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,777 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

Chopped meat: Forms the body of the hash and carries its savory flavor.
Soup stock or gravy: Adds moisture and liquid so the meat simmers tender and forms a sauce.
Butter: Adds richness and fat that rounds out the flavor of the hash.
Bread: Provides a crisp, browned base that soaks up the hash.

“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.