Name: Boiled Beef Flank
Ingredients: 4½ pounds beef flank; coarse sea salt; black pepper; a pinch of ground cloves

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 ↓

Boiled Beef Flank

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

4½ pounds beef flank
coarse sea salt
black pepper
a pinch of ground cloves

Directions

Prepare

Wash the beef flank and season it with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and a pinch of ground cloves.
Roll the beef and tie it securely.

Cook and serve

Boil the beef until tender.
Once done, press the beef between weights and serve it cold.

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.

Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Beef + clovetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,462 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef flank: Provides the main body of the dish, becoming tender and sliceable after long gentle boiling.
Coarse sea salt: Seasons the meat and helps draw out and distribute flavour through the beef.