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Beef Potted Like Venison

A preserved beef dish flavored with saltpetre, spices, vinegar, and wine, then baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg 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 ↓

Beef Potted Like Venison

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Remove the inward skin from the beef and cut it into thick slices.

  2. Soak the beef in pump water for 6 hours.

  3. Mix saltpetre with white salt and rub it into the meat.

  4. Sprinkle the meat with wine vinegar and let it marinate for 3-4 days, turning daily.

Season and pot

  1. Rinse the meat with claret and season with cloves, mace, nutmeg, and peppers.

  2. Mix savory, thyme, sage, and lemon rind, and rub this mixture into the meat.

  3. Bind the meat with tape and place it in a long pot.

  4. Add claret to the pot and cover with the skins, then bake.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Saltpetre
Preserves the meat and gives it a firm texture and rosy colour when cured.
White salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the meat while helping it keep during curing.
Wine vinegar
Adds acidity that tenderises the surface and helps flavour penetrate the meat.
Claret
Adds moisture and wine flavour to the meat as it rinses and bakes.
Cloves
Adds warm aromatic flavour to the meat.

The step that matters

Marinating in saltpetre and salt. Curing salts must be worked evenly through the meat and given the full marinating time. Uneven rubbing or cutting the time short leaves parts of the beef under-preserved and unevenly seasoned.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, wine, vinegar, clove, mace, nutmeg, pepper):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, wine, vinegar, clove, mace, nutmeg, 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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