Skip to main content
Main

To Pot Beef

Beef seasoned, baked, diced, pounded with spices, and pressed into pots with clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

To Pot Beef

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cure the beef

  1. Rub the steak with coarse sea salt, moist sugar, and saltpetre.

  2. Let it sit for 24 hours.

  3. Dry the steak.

Bake

  1. Place it in a baking pan with mace, cloves, and fresh butter.

  2. Cover with water and tie paper over the pan.

  3. Bake for 4 hours at 300°F (150°C).

  4. Remove the meat from the liquid.

  5. Let it cool completely.

Pot and seal

  1. Cut the meat into small dice, removing all fat and sinew.

  2. Pound the meat in a mortar with fresh butter, Cayenne, mace, and nutmeg until smooth.

  3. Press the mixture into pots.

  4. Cover with clarified butter, about ¼ inch thick.

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. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 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

Rump steak
Provides the meat that becomes the body of the potted spread after baking and pounding.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it during the curing period.
Saltpetre
Helps the meat keep its pink colour during curing.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and a smooth, spreadable texture to the pounded meat.
Moist sugar
Adds a mild sweetness that balances the salt in the cure.

The step that matters

Pounding the meat smooth. The meat must be cooled fully and pounded with butter until smooth; warm or coarse meat will not blend evenly and the spread turns grainy. Removing all fat and sinew first keeps the texture fine.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, clove, butter, pepper, nutmeg. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes