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Spiced Beef

A beef roast cured with mace, nutmeg, cloves, cayenne, and sugar, then stewed with carrots, herbs, parsley, and onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Spiced Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the beef

  1. Mix ground mace, nutmeg, ground cloves, cayenne pepper, and brown sugar in a bowl.

  2. Rub the beef with this mixture for 3 days, turning it once each day.

  3. After 3 days, add the coarse sea salt and continue rubbing daily for 10 more days.

  4. After 10 days, dip the beef in cold spring water 2-3 times and shape it nicely.

Stew and serve

  1. Place the beef in a stew pan with beef broth and bring to a boil, skimming off any scum.

  2. Once boiling, add sliced carrots, sweet herbs, parsley, and onion.

  3. Stew gently for 4 hours.

  4. If serving cold, let the beef cool in the broth, then transfer to a clean pan and pour the broth over it.

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. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender through long, slow stewing.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat during curing and helps preserve it.
Coarse brown sugar
Balances the salt and spices and promotes browning on the meat's surface.
Beef broth
Provides liquid for gentle stewing, keeping the meat moist and adding savory flavor.
Ground cloves
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor that penetrates the meat during curing.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 4 hours. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil lets collagen in the tough cut break down slowly, yielding tender meat without tightening or drying the fibers.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, nutmeg, clove, pepper, sugar, carrot, parsley):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, nutmeg, clove, pepper, sugar, carrot, parsley. 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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