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Potted Meat, Beef, Veal, Chicken, or Venison

A dish of small pieces of cold meat mixed with butter, pepper, mace, sea salt, and cloves, then packed into molds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Potted Meat, Beef, Veal, Chicken, or Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the meat into small pieces and process it through a sausage machine.

  2. Add butter, pepper, ground mace, coarse sea salt, and ground cloves to the meat.

  3. Mix the ingredients thoroughly by squeezing them through your hands.

Pack

  1. Pack the mixture tightly into molds.

  2. Add more butter if needed to keep it moist.

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 + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,777 recipes

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

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Cold meat
Forms the body of the spread, providing the main texture and flavor.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping keep the mixture moist and smooth.
Ground mace
Contributes a warm, aromatic flavor to the meat.
Ground cloves
Adds a strong, warm aroma and spice flavor.

The step that matters

Packing the mixture tightly into molds. Tight packing removes air pockets, which helps the spread hold its shape and keeps it from spoiling quickly on exposure to air.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, butter, pepper, clove):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, butter, pepper, clove. 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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