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Spiced Beef

A slow‑cooked beef roast seasoned with salt, pepper, mace, nutmeg, onions, and cloves, baked for five hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove 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 ↓

Spiced Beef

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the beef

  1. Wash the beef.

  2. Remove the bone from the beef.

  3. Skewer the beef into a proper shape.

  4. Rub the beef well with coarse sea salt.

  5. Place the beef in a clean pickling tub.

  6. Sprinkle more salt over the beef.

  7. Close the tub tightly.

  8. Let the beef sit for a week, turning it daily.

  9. Sprinkle fresh salt on the beef daily while it sits.

  10. After a week, rub the beef with black pepper, mace, and nutmeg.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the beef in an earthen stewing pan with a layer of suet underneath.

  2. Add sliced onions to the pan.

  3. Add cloves to the pan.

  4. Cover the beef with water.

  5. Bake the beef in a 300°F (150°C) oven for five hours.

  6. Let the beef cool before serving as a breakfast or supper dish.

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. Nutmeg + clovetop 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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Round of beef
Forms the main body of the roast, and its long salting cures it so it stays firm and seasoned.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and cures it, seasoning it through over the long resting period.
Black pepper
Adds sharp aromatic heat that flavours the crust of the spiced beef.
Mace
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the meat.
Suet
Layered underneath the beef, it adds fat that keeps the meat moist during the long bake.

The step that matters

Salting and turning the beef for a week. Salt must reach the centre of the meat to cure it evenly. Turning daily spreads the brine, and skipping this leaves uneven seasoning and texture.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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