Skip to main content
Main

Potted Beef

A preserved beef dish cooked slowly, shredded, and coated with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Potted Beef

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the beef

  1. Rub the lean beef with salt and let it sit for two days.

  2. Place the beef in a jar and add ½ pint of water.

  3. Cover the jar tightly with a coarse paste or dough.

  4. Set the jar in a 300°F (150°C) oven or in boiling water for about four hours.

  5. Drain off the gravy and place the meat before the fire to remove moisture.

Pound and pot

  1. Shred or cut the meat into pieces and pound it in a mortar with black pepper, cloves, mace, nutmeg, and oiled butter, adding gradually and moistening with some gravy.

  2. Pound until it reaches a fine paste consistency, similar to cream cheese.

  3. Transfer the mixture into potting cans and cover with an inch of melted, skimmed, and strained butter.

  4. Tie leather over each pot and keep them tightly covered in a dry place.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef round
Lean meat that slowly breaks down into tender fibres that pound into a smooth paste.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and moisture to the paste and, when melted over the top, seals the pots against air.

The step that matters

Pounding to a fine paste. Moistening gradually with gravy keeps the meat fibres loosened so they break into a smooth, spreadable texture rather than a dry, stringy one.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, clove, nutmeg, butter. 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes