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Beef a LA Mode

A slow‑cooked beef stew with pork fat, flour, and root vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef a LA Mode

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Preheat a pot and add drippings or slices of pork.

  2. Lard the beef with salt pork or make incisions and press in the strips.

  3. Brown the meat on all sides in the hot pot.

  4. Dredge the meat with flour, salt, and pepper.

Braise

  1. Half cover the meat with boiling water.

  2. Add carrots, turnips, onions, and parsley to the pot.

  3. Cover tightly and simmer for 4 to 5 hours, adding more water as needed.

  4. Ensure about 1 cup of liquid remains when the meat is done.

Serve

  1. Place the meat on a hot platter, thicken the gravy with the vegetables, and pour around the meat.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Long simmering in liquid turns the tough connective tissue tender and moist.
Salt pork
Its fat keeps the lean beef moist and adds savory flavor as it melts during cooking.
Flour
Dredging the meat helps it brown and lightly thickens the cooking liquid into gravy.
Carrots, turnips, and onions
Their starch and pectin break down into the liquid, thickening the gravy and adding sweetness.

The step that matters

Simmer covered over low heat for 4 to 5 hours. Slow, gentle simmering converts the tough connective tissue in the round into gelatin. Boiling hard or rushing the cooking leaves the meat stringy and dry, and letting the liquid evaporate too far leaves the gravy too thin or too concentrated.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, flour, pepper, carrot, turnip, parsley):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, flour, pepper, carrot, turnip, parsley. 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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