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Beef a LA Mode

A slow‑cooked beef stew with carrots, turnips, onions, and parsley, seasoned with salt pork and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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. Lard the beef with thin strips of salt pork using a larding needle or by making incisions with a sharp knife.

  2. Heat the drippings or slices of pork in a pot until hot.

  3. Brown the meat on all sides.

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

Braise

  1. Add boiling water to half cover the meat.

  2. Add the sliced carrot, turnip, onion, and parsley to the pot.

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

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

Serve

  1. Place the meat on a hot platter, thicken the gravy with the vegetables, and pour it 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 round
Forms the main body of the dish; long slow simmering turns its connective tissue tender.
Salt pork
Larded through the beef, it adds fat and savory flavor that bastes the lean meat as it cooks.
Drippings
Fat used for browning, which builds deep color and flavor on the meat's surface.
Flour
Dredging coats the meat and later thickens the cooking liquid into gravy.
Carrot, turnip, and onion
Break down during simmering, adding sweetness and body to the gravy.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly with the lid tightly closed. Gentle, moist heat over several hours softens the tough connective tissue in the round without drying the meat. A rolling boil toughens muscle fibers, and lost liquid leaves the gravy too thin or the meat dry.

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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