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Hung Beef

A preserved beef cured with salt, saltpetre, and sugar, then hung and boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Hung Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Hang the beef for 5 to 6 days until slightly stale.

  2. Wash the beef in a mixture of sugar and water.

  3. Mix the dry coarse sea salt, saltpetre, and brown sugar together.

  4. Rub the mixture all over the beef and place it in a pan.

Cure and dry

  1. Cover the beef with common salt and let it sit for 8 days, turning it every other day for an additional 10 days.

  2. Dry the beef, sprinkle it with flour, and hang it in a warm place for 2 weeks.

Cook and store

  1. To cook, place the beef in cold pump water with a little coarse sea salt and boil gently until tender.

  2. Remove the beef and let it cool.

  3. It can be stored for 1 to 2 months.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Beef + sugartop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 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

Beef
Forms the meat that is cured, dried and then boiled until tender.
Saltpetre
Helps preserve the meat and gives cured beef its characteristic pinkish colour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the beef during curing.
Brown sugar
Adds mild sweetness and balances the saltiness of the cure.

The step that matters

Covering with common salt and turning every other day. Salt must penetrate evenly through the whole piece of meat. Regular turning keeps the cure distributed, so no area is left under-salted, which would allow spoilage during the long cure.

“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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