Skip to main content
Main

Pressed Beef and Ham

A pressed meat dish made from boiled corned beef and ham, layered with mustard or walnut catsup and garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,588 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Pressed Beef and Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Boil the corned beef and ham separately until tender.

  2. Remove nearly all the fat and break the meat into strips.

Press

  1. While hot, pack the meat firmly in a mold, alternating layers with a few drops of mixed mustard or walnut catsup.

  2. Cover the mold with a flat surface and add heavy weights.

  3. Let it stand in a cold place overnight.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, cut into thin slices with a sharp knife and garnish with parsley.

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. Mustard + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Ham + mustardtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together747 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Beef + hamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,729 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Beef + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,866 recipes

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

  5. Beef + mustardtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Corned beef
Provides the main meat body, which holds together as a firm sliceable block once pressed.
Ham
Adds a second meat layer with a milder, savoury flavour to the pressed block.
Mixed mustard or walnut catsup
Adds sharp, tangy flavour that cuts through the richness of the meat.

The step that matters

Pressing the meat while hot and weighting it overnight. Packing the meat hot and pressing it under weight lets the proteins and gelatin bind as they cool, so the block holds together and slices cleanly instead of crumbling.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, ham, mustard):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, ham, mustard. 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes