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Brighton Hunting Beef

A beef cured in saltpetre, sea salt, allspice, and pepper, then baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,395 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Brighton Hunting Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the beef

  1. Soak the beef in spring water for a few hours.

  2. Drain the beef and rub in powdered saltpetre, repeating two to three times.

  3. Rub in coarse sea salt several times over the next 24 hours.

  4. Rub in a mixture of allspice and pepper for another 24 hours.

  5. Let the beef sit in the pickle for 10 days, turning it daily.

Bake

  1. Bake the beef in a pan for 4 hours, covered with crust.

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. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 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

Powdered saltpetre
Cures the meat, helping it keep its pink colour and resist spoilage.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the beef and seasons it while it cures.
Allspice
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the cured beef.
Pepper
Adds sharp aroma and spice to the outside of the beef.

The step that matters

Turning the beef daily in the pickle. Turning the beef every day keeps the cure in contact with all its surfaces, so it penetrates evenly. Parts left resting on the bottom of the pickle can cure unevenly and spoil.

“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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