Why it works: Sugar and pork are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 37% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,579 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓
To Pickle Pork
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the pork
Sprinkle the pork with common salt and let it drain for 24 hours.
Cure
Mix and pound the saltpetre, coarse sugar, sal prunel, and a little common salt.
Rub the mixture onto the pork.
Pack the pork tightly in a small deep tub, filling spaces with common salt.
Place large pebbles on the pork to prevent it from floating in the pickle.
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.
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Sugar + porktop 37% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together4,579 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Saltpetre
- Preserves the meat and gives cured pork its characteristic pink colour.
- Coarse sugar
- Balances the salt and softens the sharpness of the cure.
- Common salt
- Draws out moisture and preserves the pork during curing.
- Sal prunel
- Acts as a fixing agent that helps the cure work evenly through the meat.
The step that matters
Packing the pork tightly in the tub. Gaps let the pork spoil or cure unevenly, so filling spaces with salt and weighting the meat with pebbles keeps every piece submerged in the pickle.
“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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