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Spiced Beef

A beef dish seasoned with allspice, cloves, mace, brown sugar, saltpetre, and sea salt, then cured for ten days and boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Spiced Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spice rub

  1. Pound the allspice, cloves, and mace in a mortar.

  2. Add the brown sugar and rub the mixture well into the beef.

Cure the beef

  1. Rub the beef with saltpetre and coarse sea salt.

  2. Turn and rub the beef daily for 10 days.

Cook

  1. After 10 days, boil the beef for 6 hours.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Allspice + macetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Beef + clovetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Beef + allspicetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,940 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Is the main cut that the cure penetrates and the long boil tenderises.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and helps the cure penetrate it.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the salt in the cure.
Allspice
Contributes warm aroma and flavour to the rubbed-in spice mix.

The step that matters

Turning and rubbing the beef daily for 10 days. Salt and curing agents penetrate meat slowly by diffusion, so uneven or skipped rubbing leaves parts under-cured. Daily turning keeps the cure in contact with all surfaces so it spreads evenly through the joint.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, allspice, clove, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, allspice, clove, sugar. 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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