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Another Pickle Fok Corned Beef

A pickled corned beef prepared by boiling in saltpetre, salt, sugar, molasses, and pearl-ash.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and molasses are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,225 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Another Pickle Fok Corned Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the brine

  1. Bring 6 gallons of water to a boil in a large pot.

  2. Dissolve 3 ounces of saltpetre in the boiling water.

  3. Dip the beef pieces into the boiling saltpetre water for a few seconds.

  4. Once all pieces are immersed, allow them to cool.

  5. Pack the cooled beef into a clean cask.

Make the pickle

  1. In the same boiling water, add 9 pounds of salt, 3 pounds of brown sugar, 1 quart of molasses, and 1 ounce of pearl-ash.

  2. Boil the mixture, carefully removing any scum that rises from the molasses and sugar.

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. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Saltpetre
Helps the beef keep its pink colour and gives it a cured flavour.
Salt
Draws out moisture and preserves the meat while seasoning it through.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the salt and softens the sharpness of the cure.
Molasses
Adds depth, dark colour and a rich aroma to the pickle.
Pearl-ash
Raises the alkalinity of the brine, helping it penetrate the meat.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture and skim the scum. Molasses and sugar throw up scum as they boil, and leaving it in the pickle can spoil the flavour and cloud the brine. Skim it off carefully while the mixture boils so the finished pickle stays clean.

“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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