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Curing Meat

A method for curing beef tongue with salt, sugar, saltpetre, pepper, and garlic or shallot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Curing Meat

Ingredients

Directions

Cure

  1. Soak the tongue in salt and water overnight and clean it well.

  2. Sprinkle the tongue with salt and let it drain until the next day.

  3. Mix the common salt, coarse sugar, saltpetre, ground pepper, and chopped garlic or shallot.

  4. Rub the mixture into the tongue daily for a week, adding another ½ cup of salt after a week.

Dry and smoke

  1. For drying, write the date on parchment and tie it to the tongue.

  2. Smoke the tongue for 3 days or hang it in a dry place.

Cook

  1. If dried, soak the tongue for 4 to 5 hours before cooking.

  2. Boil the tongue until extremely tender, about 5 hours.

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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 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 clove barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 17,182 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

Common salt
Draws out moisture and preserves the meat during the cure.
Coarse sugar
Balances the salt and adds sweetness to the cured surface.
Saltpetre
Helps the meat keep its pink colour and inhibits spoilage during curing.
Garlic or shallot
Adds aroma and savoury flavour to the cure.

The step that matters

Rubbing the cure in daily for a week. Salt must reach the centre of the thick tongue evenly; missed days leave uneven curing and spoilage risk. Adding the extra salt after a week keeps the cure strong enough to finish penetrating.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits about as well
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

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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