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Spiced Beef

A beef roast cured with saltpetre, sugar, salt, allspice, and salt pork, then boiled for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Spiced Beef

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the beef

  1. Rub the beef with saltpetre and brown sugar; let it stand for 2 days.

  2. Rub the beef with coarse sea salt and let it stand for 10 days, turning daily.

  3. Sprinkle allspice over the beef.

Stuff and cook

  1. Gash the beef with a knife and stuff the gashes with strips of salt pork dipped in allspice.

  2. Place the beef in a large kettle and cover with water and meat juices.

  3. Boil slowly for about 6 hours.

Finish

  1. When cool, turn and trim the beef.

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

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

  2. Allspice + porktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,194 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Sugar + allspicetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,938 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Sugar + porktop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,579 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender and sliceable during the long cook.
Saltpetre
Helps cure the meat, keeping it pink and slowing spoilage during the long rest.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it through, preserving it during the cure.
Brown sugar
Adds mild sweetness that balances the salt in the cure.
Allspice
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the surface and the salt pork stuffing.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour inside the gashes as the beef cooks.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for about 6 hours. A gentle simmer lets the connective tissue in the beef soften slowly into tenderness. A hard, rapid boil tightens the muscle fibres and can leave the meat tough and stringy.

Swap the allspice

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

  1. Gingerfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Pepperfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, sugar, pork. 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.

More spiced beef recipes

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