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To Pot Beef

A preserved beef cured with saltpetre, sea salt, and pepper, then baked and finished with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Pot Beef

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the beef

  1. Rub the beef with saltpetre and let it sit overnight.

  2. Salt the beef with coarse sea salt.

  3. Cover the beef with water for four days in a small pan.

  4. Dry the beef with a cloth.

  5. Season the beef with black pepper.

Bake and pot

  1. Place the beef in a small pan and cover it with coarse paste.

  2. Bake the beef for five hours in a cool oven.

  3. When cold, remove strings and fat.

  4. Beat the meat finely with warm butter and enough gravy to make a paste.

  5. Pack the mixture into small pots and cover it with melted butter.

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

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

  2. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides the meat that is cured, baked and beaten into a paste.
Saltpetre
Cures the meat, giving it a pink colour and a firm texture.
Fine butter
Adds richness and moisture to the beaten meat and sealed top layer.

“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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