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Larded Flank of Beef Smoked

A thick flank of beef cured with salt, spices, and bacon, then smoked and boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Larded Flank of Beef Smoked

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cure

  1. Bone the thick flank of beef neatly and remove the skin.

  2. Rub both sides of the meat with coarse sea salt, sal prunelle, and saltpetre.

  3. Let the meat sit in this mixture for eight days, turning it daily.

Season and smoke

  1. Wipe the meat clean and strew the spices and herbs over one side.

  2. Lay the slices of bacon on the spices and roll the meat tightly.

  3. Bind the rolled meat with broad tape and smoke it for two weeks.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the smoked meat until tender, adding ½ pint of vinegar to the water.

  2. Once cooled, cut the meat across into slices.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  3. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef flank
Forms the main body of the joint that is cured, smoked and sliced.
Saltpetre
Helps the meat keep its colour and preserves it during the long cure.
Sal prunelle
Adds salt and helps draw moisture out of the meat during curing.
Sweet fat bacon
Adds fat and moisture that keep the rolled meat from drying out.
Cloves, mace and nutmeg
Provide warm aromatic flavour that penetrates the meat during curing.

The step that matters

Boil the smoked meat until tender. The joint is dense and heavily cured, so it needs long, gentle simmering to soften the connective tissue. Boiling too hard can toughen the outer layers and make the slices dry.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

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