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Pickle for Meats

A brine made with salt, pepper, juniper berries, coriander, garlic, onions, sanders-wood, and sugar for pickling meats.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Pickle for Meats

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pickle

  1. Combine the salt, black pepper, juniper berries, coriander powder, bruised cloves of garlic, and onions in a pot.

  2. Skim the mixture before adding the sweet herbs and spices.

  3. Let the mixture cool.

  4. Boil sanders-wood in the mixture until it resembles port wine.

Cure the meat

  1. Rub the meat with sanders-wood.

  2. Let the meat sit overnight.

  3. Pack the meat into a pickling tub.

  4. Pour the cooled pickle over the meat, ensuring it covers the meat by at least an inch.

  5. Place a board with weights on top to keep the meat submerged and cover it to exclude air.

  6. Boil the pickle occasionally to preserve the meat.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Coriander + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,474 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Pepper + coriandertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,949 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Coriander + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,221 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and preserves it while seasoning it.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the salt in the pickle.
Sanders-wood
Gives the meat a reddish color and adds a mild earthy flavor.
Juniper berries
Adds a resinous, piney aroma to the pickle.

The step that matters

Pour the cooled pickle over the meat. If the pickle is still warm, it can partly cook the meat and uneven curing may follow. Keeping the meat fully covered prevents spoilage at the surface, since exposed meat can spoil.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, coriander, clove, garlic, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Eggplantfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, coriander, clove, garlic, sugar. 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 meat pickle recipes

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