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Spiced Beef

A beef roast cured with salt, sugar, spices, and saltpetre, then boiled and pickled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Spiced Beef

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cure

  1. Rub the beef with the salt, sugar, cloves, allspice, pepper, and saltpetre mixture.

  2. Turn and rub each side twice a day for a week.

  3. You can reuse the pickle by rubbing a handful of salt into the meat.

Cook and press

  1. Wash off the spices and place the beef in a pot of boiling water.

  2. Add a teacup of cold water whenever it boils hard.

  3. Simmer for 5 hours on low heat.

  4. Press the beef under a heavy weight until cold.

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beef + clovetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Saltpetre
Helps keep the meat pink and gives the cured flavour.
Brown sugar or molasses
Adds sweetness that balances the salt during curing.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it through the cure.

The step that matters

Adding cold water when the pot boils hard. Boiling vigorously toughens meat proteins and can make the beef dry and stringy. Adding cold water drops the temperature so the beef simmers gently and stays tender.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Clovethe original
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, sugar, allspice, pepper. 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 pickled beef recipes

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