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Pickled Pork

Pickled pork prepared by salting, spicing, boiling, and curing in cider vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pickled Pork

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Remove the rind from the pork and lightly salt it overnight.

  2. In the morning, sprinkle the pork with ground cloves, allspice, cinnamon, and black pepper.

  3. Roll the pork tightly with the spice side in and tie it with a strong cord.

Cook and pickle

  1. Sew the pork in a muslin sack and boil until thoroughly cooked.

  2. Let the pork cool, slice it, and place it in cold cider vinegar.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Pork
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender and sliceable once fully cooked.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat and draws out moisture during the overnight salting.
Ground cloves
Adds warm, aromatic flavour that penetrates the rolled pork.
Ground cinnamon
Adds sweet, woody aroma to the spiced pork.
Cold cider vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the sliced pork.

The step that matters

Boil until thoroughly cooked. The rolled pork is dense and tied in a sack, so heat must travel through the whole roll. Undercooked centres stay unsafe, so the meat should be boiled until cooked all the way through before cooling and pickling.

Swap the cinnamon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, clove, allspice, pepper, cider, vinegar):

  1. Thymefits about as well
  2. Cinnamonthe original
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, clove, allspice, pepper, cider, vinegar. 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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