Why it works: Sugar and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,401 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Pickle for Beef, Ham, or Tongue
Ingredients
Directions
Make the pickle
Boil water, coarse sea salt, common salt, coarse sugar, saltpetre, and bruised black pepper for 20 minutes, then skim off any scum that rises.
Pour the pickle into a tub or deep earthen pan.
Cure the meat
Once cold, submerge the meat completely in the pickle.
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.
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Sugar + peppertop 32% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together19,401 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Sugar and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 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
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it deeply during curing.
- Common salt
- Adds salinity to the brine, helping preserve and season the meat.
- Coarse sugar
- Balances the saltiness and adds mild sweetness to the cured meat.
- Saltpetre
- Helps preserve the meat and gives cured meat its characteristic pink colour.
- Black pepper
- Adds aroma and a mild, spicy flavour to the brine.
The step that matters
Submerge the meat only once the pickle is cold. Hot brine can partly cook the surface of the meat and make it unevenly cured. Cooling the pickle first lets the salt and curing agents penetrate gradually and evenly.
“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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