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Boiled Silver Side

A preserved fish made by boiling and pickling silver side with salt, sugar, pepper, and saltpetre.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,401 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Silver Side

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Trim the silver side and rub in ½ pound of common salt. Let it sit for 1 day.

  2. In a pot, combine 4 ounces of sugar, 1 ounce of powdered saltpetre, ¼ pound of coarse sea salt, ½ pound of common salt, and 2 ounces of black pepper.

  3. Cover the mixture with cold water and bring it to a boil. Let it simmer for 2 hours.

  4. Rub the mixture well into the silver side and let it pickle, turning it every day for 14 days.

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. Sugar + peppertop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 characteristic of corned beef.
Sugar
Balances the salt and adds a mild sweetness to the cure.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it during the pickling period.

The step that matters

Rubbing the cure in and turning the meat daily. The salt mixture must reach every part of the meat and be redistributed by turning, so the cure penetrates evenly over the 14 days and the meat does not spoil or cure unevenly.

“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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