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A-LA-mode Beef

A slow‑cooked beef stew with bacon, spices, and a butter‑vinegar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

A-LA-mode Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Lard the beef with bacon and season with black pepper, coarse sea salt, and ground cloves.

  2. Place the beef in a pot with 1 pint of water.

Stew

  1. Set the pot over low heat overnight to stew with bay leaves, white pepper, and chopped onion.

  2. Turn the beef two or three times while cooking.

  3. Once cooked and browned, add butter and vinegar.

Serve

  1. Skim off the fat and pour the cooking liquid over the beef when serving.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Clove + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Slow stewing over hours turns the tough cut tender and moist.
Bacon
Larding adds fat and smoky savour that melts into the meat as it cooks.
Butter
Added at the end, it enriches the cooking liquid and adds richness and gloss.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich meat and cooking liquid.
Onion
Releases sweetness and aromatic depth into the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Low, slow overnight stewing. Heat that is too high toughens the muscle fibres and dries the meat. Gentle, prolonged cooking lets collagen break down into gelatin, which makes the beef tender and gives the liquid body.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, clove, onion, butter, vinegar):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, clove, onion, butter, vinegar. 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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