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Potted Beef

A beef flank cured with saltpetre, salt, vinegar, spices, and lemon rind, then baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Potted Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Remove the inside skin from the flank of beef and slash the meat, especially in the thickest parts.

  2. Soak the beef in pumped water for 6 hours.

  3. Rub the beef with a mixture of saltpetre and common salt.

  4. Sprinkle white wine vinegar over the beef and let it sit for 3 days, turning it once a day.

  5. Wash the brine off with claret.

Season and bake

  1. Mix cloves, mace, nutmeg, white pepper, red pepper, savory, thyme, sage, and lemon rind together.

  2. Rub the seasoning mixture into the cuts and slashes of the beef.

  3. Bind the beef with tape, pour claret over it, and cover with the skins.

  4. Bake in a long pot.

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Saltpetre
Preserves the meat and gives it its characteristic pink colour.
Common salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the meat while helping to cure it.
White wine vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps tenderise the meat.
Cloves
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the beef.

The step that matters

Rub the beef with saltpetre and common salt. Saltpetre and salt must reach the whole piece, especially the slashed and thick areas, for even curing. Uneven rubbing leaves spots that spoil or stay grey and under-seasoned.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, white wine, vinegar, clove, mace, nutmeg, pepper. 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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