Why it works: Meat and allspice work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 566 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓
Spiced Beef
Ingredients
Directions
Cure the meat
Place the meat in a crock and turn it every day for three weeks.
On the first day, rub in the brown sugar.
On the second day, rub in the salt and saltpetre.
On the third day, rub in 0.5 lb of allspice, keeping the other 0.5 lb to boil with the meat.
Boil and cool
When ready to boil, bandage the meat with a cloth if not previously corded.
Cover the meat with hot water and boil for three to four hours. When the meat floats, it is finished.
Leave it in the water to cool and remove the cloth the next day.
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.
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Meat + allspicetop 24% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together566 recipes
Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
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Sugar + allspicetop 24% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together6,938 recipes
Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
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Sugar + meattop 34% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together2,866 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Common salt
- Draws out moisture and seasons the meat while helping preserve it during the cure.
- Saltpetre
- Helps the meat keep its pink colour during curing.
- Brown sugar
- Adds sweetness and balances the harshness of the salt in the cure.
- Ground allspice
- Adds warm aromatic flavour to the outside of the meat.
The step that matters
Boiling until the meat floats. Boiling for too short a time leaves the centre under-cooked, while the meat floats only once it is cooked through and has lost density, so floating is a useful sign of doneness.
Swap the allspice
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, meat):
- Cinnamonfits better
- Nutmegfits better
- Gingerfits better
- Allspicethe original
Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, meat. 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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