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Beef, Spiced

Salted beef cooked with butter, vegetables, herbs, spices, and claret, then cooled and served cold or as breakfast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Beef, Spiced

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Salt the beef for 10 to 12 days, removing skin and bone before salting.

  2. Wash the beef, roll it up, and tie it with tape.

  3. Wrap the beef in a buttered thin cloth.

Cook

  1. In a large pot, place the beef with butter, sliced vegetables, herbs, peppercorns, allspice, and cloves.

  2. Cover and cook for 20 minutes.

  3. Add stock to cover half the beef and pour in the claret.

  4. Boil for about 4 hours.

Press and serve

  1. Press the beef, let it cool, remove the cloth, and glaze or coat with aspic.

  2. Garnish with salad and serve cold or as a breakfast dish.

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 + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Thyme + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,077 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Thin flank beef
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender during long, slow simmering.
Claret
Adds acidity and wine flavour to the cooking liquid, deepening the taste of the meat.
Butter or dripping
Adds fat that enriches the beef and helps keep its surface moist during cooking.
Sliced vegetables
Release sweetness and aroma into the cooking liquid, flavouring the beef and stock.

The step that matters

Boil for about 4 hours. Boiling too hard can toughen the meat and cloud the liquid, while too gentle a heat leaves flank tough. A steady, low simmering keeps the beef tender and moist.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, carrot, thyme, allspice, clove):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, carrot, thyme, allspice, clove. 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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