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Cold Meat Kedgeree

Cold meat kedgeree is a chilled dish of cooked rice, meat, eggs, butter, shallot, parsley, nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Cold Meat Kedgeree

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the rice as for curry.

  2. Chop the whites of the hard-boiled eggs coarsely and keep them warm.

  3. Rub the yolks through a wire sieve.

  4. Melt the butter in a saucepan and slightly fry the shallot or onion.

Cook

  1. Add the meat and cook for 2 to 3 minutes.

  2. Stir in the rice, the chopped egg whites, a pinch of nutmeg, and salt and pepper to season.

  3. Stir over the heat until thoroughly hot.

Serve

  1. Arrange in a pyramidal form on a hot dish.

  2. Garnish with the egg yolks and parsley.

  3. Serve.

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. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  4. Shallot + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,019 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 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

Cooked meat
Forms the main body of the dish and provides savoury protein and flavour.
Cooked rice
Provides the bulk and light, separate grains that carry the other ingredients.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and texture; the whites are chopped and the yolks used as garnish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries the flavour of the shallot or onion.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, rice, egg, butter, parsley, nutmeg, pepper):

  1. Shallotthe original
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Spinachfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, rice, egg, butter, parsley, nutmeg, pepper. 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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