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Potted Beef

A preserved beef and pork mixture cooked in cans.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Potted Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Plunge the beef into salted, boiling water and cook until very tender.

  2. Cover the pork with cold water, bring to a boil, and cook for 2½ hours.

  3. Remove all bones from the beef and skin the pork.

Make the paste

  1. Grind the beef and pork to a smooth paste.

  2. Thoroughly incorporate the salt and mixed spices into the meat paste.

Can and process

  1. Place the mixture into cans and cap them.

  2. Process 14-pound cans for 40 minutes at 250°F (120°C).

  3. Process 4½-pound cans for 45 minutes.

  4. Process 1-pound cans for 50 minutes.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Summer savory + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together125 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Nutmeg + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together687 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Nutmeg + summer savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main body of the paste, becoming tender through long cooking and grinding.
Salt pork
Adds fat that keeps the paste moist and gives it a rich texture.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and helps preserve it.
Mixed spice
Adds aroma and warmth that flavour the paste throughout.

The step that matters

Cooking the beef until very tender. Beef must be cooked fully soft before grinding, because connective tissue only breaks down into tender texture with sustained heat. Undercooked meat grinds coarsely and will not form a smooth paste.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, summer savory, marjoram):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, summer savory, marjoram. 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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