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To Collar Beef

A method of curing beef with salt, spices, and boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,225 recipes. Both carry terpineol, which smells pine, woody. The science ↓

To Collar Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Cure

  1. Lay the beef in a dish with salt and saltpetre, turning and rubbing it every day for a week.

Prepare and roll

  1. Remove all bones and gristle from the beef.

  2. Skin the inside part of the beef.

  3. Cover the beef thickly with chopped parsley, sage, thyme, marjoram, pennyroyal, pepper, salt, and allspice.

  4. Roll the meat tightly.

  5. Bind the rolled meat.

Wrap, boil and shape

  1. Boil gently for 7 to 8 hours.

  2. Wrap the beef in a cloth before binding.

  3. Place the wrapped beef under a weight while hot to shape it oval.

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. Thyme + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

  2. Sage + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together507 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Sage + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,485 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Parsley + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,979 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

Beef
Lean flank meat that becomes tender and sliceable after long gentle cooking.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the meat during the week-long cure.
Saltpetre
Curing agent that helps keep the meat pink and firm while it cures.
Allspice
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the herb coating.
Sage
Contributes a savoury, aromatic herb flavour to the coating.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 7 to 8 hours. A gentle simmer lets the connective tissue soften slowly without tightening the muscle fibres. A hard, rapid boil toughens the meat and can break up the rolled shape.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, parsley, sage, thyme, marjoram, pepper):

  1. Winter savoryfits better
  2. Rosemaryfits better
  3. Oreganofits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, parsley, sage, thyme, marjoram, 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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