Skip to main content
Main

Another Pickle for Corned Beef

A brine for pickling corned beef using saltpetre, salt, sugar, molasses, and pearl-ash.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and molasses are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,225 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Another Pickle for Corned Beef

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Bring 6 gallons of water to a boil and dissolve 3 ounces of saltpetre in it.

  2. Dip the beef pieces into the boiling saltpetre water for a few seconds.

  3. Once all beef is immersed and cooled, pack it in a clean cask.

  4. In the saltpetre water, add 9 pounds of salt, 3 pounds of brown sugar, 1 quart of molasses, and 1 ounce of pearl-ash.

  5. Boil the mixture, carefully removing any scum that rises from the molasses and sugar.

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 + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Salt
Draws water out of the beef and helps preserve it while seasoning the meat.
Saltpetre
Helps the cured meat keep its pink colour and resists spoilage bacteria.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the saltiness of the brine.
Molasses
Adds deep flavour, sweetness and colour to the brine.

The step that matters

Skim the scum while boiling. Scum rising from the molasses and sugar is impurities that can cloud the brine and taint the flavour. Removing it as it forms keeps the brine clean.

“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.

You might also like

Molasses SauceMolasses Sauce32 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes