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Brown Fricassee of Beef

A slow‑cooked beef stew with flour, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, and onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Brown Fricassee of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Dredge the beef pieces with flour and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Brown the beef in the fat salt pork.

Make the sauce

  1. Remove the beef and add 2 tablespoons of flour to the fat, browning it.

  2. Add 1 pint of boiling water, Worcestershire sauce, tomato ketchup, and onion slice.

Cook

  1. Pour the mixture over the beef in an earthen dish.

  2. Cook for 5 hours in an Aladdin Pail.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  5. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 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

Shin of beef
Provides the meat that becomes tender during the long, slow cooking.
Flour
Browned in the fat, it thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce.
Fat salt pork
Its fat carries the browning of the beef and flavours the sauce.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savoury, tangy depth to the sauce.
Tomato ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity, rounding out the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in the fat. Flour must be cooked until it turns golden before liquid is added; raw flour tastes pasty and thickens unevenly, while properly browned flour gives a richer colour and nutty flavour to the sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, flour, pepper, sauce, tomato, ketchup):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, flour, pepper, sauce, tomato, ketchup. 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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