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Spiced Silver Side

A cold spiced beef side seasoned with sugar, allspice, black pepper, salt, saltpetre, and simmered in consommé.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,395 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Spiced Silver Side

Ingredients

Directions

Cure

  1. Trim a silver side of beef.

  2. Mix sugar, allspice, and black pepper; rub the beef with this mixture.

  3. Let the beef sit in a container for 2 days.

  4. Rub the beef with the salt and saltpetre mixture.

  5. Let it sit for 6 days, turning daily.

Cook and cool

  1. Place the beef in a pot with consommé and simmer for 4 hours.

  2. Remove the beef and place it in a deep dish.

  3. Pour the cooking liquid over the beef and let it cool.

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. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Sugar + allspicetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,938 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. 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
Preserves the meat's pink colour and adds a cured flavour during the long cure.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the beef during the cure.
Sugar
Balances the salt and helps flavour the cure.
Consommé
Provides moisture and savoury flavour as the beef simmers.

The step that matters

Simmering the cured beef. Simmering at a gentle heat keeps the beef tender and moist. A hard boil toughens the muscle fibres and can leave the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the allspice

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits about as well
  3. Allspicethe original
  4. Gingerfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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