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To Pickle Beef, Which Will Keep Five or Six Months

This is a pickled beef recipe that preserves the meat for five or six months.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 Pickle Beef, Which Will Keep Five or Six Months

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spice rub

  1. Remove bones from the beef.

  2. Crush juniper berries, nutmeg, mace, cloves, pepper, Jamaica pepper, and salt together, then mix in the sliced garlic and shallots.

  3. Rub the spice mixture all over the beef.

Marinate and cook

  1. Place the beef in a vessel and let it marinate for 7 to 10 days.

  2. After marinating, place the beef in a pot with vinegar and white wine.

  3. Cover tightly and simmer for 6 hours, adding more vinegar and white wine as needed.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender during long, slow simmering.
Vinegar
Acidity penetrates the meat, adding tang and helping to tenderise its surface during the long soak.
White wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the liquid the beef simmers in.
Garlic
Contributes pungent aroma that infuses the meat during marinating.
Shallots
Add a mild sweetness and aroma that blends into the marinade.

The step that matters

Simmering covered for 6 hours. Long, gentle simmering in a covered pot breaks down tough connective tissue slowly. Boiling hard or letting the liquid evaporate can toughen the meat and leave it dry, so the cook must keep it at a gentle simmer and top up the vinegar and wine as needed.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, garlic, clove, allspice, nutmeg, pepper, vinegar. 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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