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To Collar Beef

A beef collar cured with salt, saltpetre, herbs, and spices, then rolled and boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,225 recipes. Both carry terpineol, which smells pine, woody. The science ↓

To Collar Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the beef

  1. Lay the beef in a dish with salt and saltpetre, turning and rubbing it every day for a week.

  2. Remove all bones and gristle, and the skin from the inside part.

Season and shape

  1. Cover the meat thickly with chopped parsley, sage, thyme, marjoram, pennyroyal, pepper, salt, and allspice.

  2. Roll the meat tightly and bind it, then boil gently for 7 to 8 hours.

  3. Wrap the meat in a cloth before binding and place it under a weight while hot to shape it oval.

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. Thyme + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

  2. Sage + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together507 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Sage + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,485 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Parsley + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,979 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

Beef
Forms the body of the dish; its lean meat becomes firm and sliceable after curing and slow cooking.
Saltpetre
Helps the meat keep its pink colour during curing and adds a cured flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it during the week-long cure.
Allspice
Adds warm, aromatic spice notes to the herb coating on the outside of the meat.

The step that matters

Boiling gently for 7 to 8 hours. Boiling too hard can toughen and break up the meat, so keep the liquid at a gentle simmer for a tender, evenly cooked result.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, parsley, sage, thyme, marjoram, pepper):

  1. Winter savoryfits better
  2. Rosemaryfits better
  3. Oreganofits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, parsley, sage, thyme, marjoram, 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.

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