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To Collar Beef

A beef cured with a mixture of coarse sea salt, fine salt, sugar, spices, and herbs, then rolled and dried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice 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 ↓

To Collar Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the beef

  1. Salt the beef with the coarse sea salt, sal prunella, coarse sugar, and white salt.

  2. Mix the hard salts finely and combine all ingredients.

  3. Turn the beef every day and rub it with the brine for eight days.

  4. After eight days, remove the beef from the brine, wash it, and wipe it dry.

Season and roll

  1. Mix cloves, mace, allspice, nutmeg, and ground pepper with chopped parsley and sweet herbs.

  2. Sprinkle the mixture on the beef and roll it up tightly.

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Allspice + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

White salt
Draws moisture out of the beef and forms the brine that cures it.
Coarse sugar
Balances the saltiness and adds mild sweetness to the cured meat.
Cloves
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the spice coating.
Nutmeg
Contributes warm, aromatic flavour to the spice coating.
Ground pepper
Adds sharp, pungent flavour to the spice coating.
Chopped parsley
Adds fresh, herbal aroma and bulk to the outer coating.

The step that matters

Turning and rubbing the beef daily in the brine for eight days. Salt must penetrate evenly through the meat; skipping turns leaves uneven curing, and salt draws out moisture, so the meat can become too dry or spoil if the cure is uneven.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, sugar, clove, allspice, nutmeg, pepper, parsley. 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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