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Pot Roast

A pot roast made with lower round steak, salt pork or beef fat, onions, herbs, and flour, simmered until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Pot Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the meat

  1. Fry salt pork or beef fat in a large pot until hot.

  2. Add the steak and brown it well on both sides.

  3. Place the browned meat in a kettle with a little water.

Make the gravy base

  1. Fry the chopped onion, parsley, bay leaf, and thyme in the same fat.

  2. Dredge the fat with flour.

  3. Let the flour brown slightly.

  4. Pour in some water and add it to the kettle with the meat.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil gently until noon.

  2. Serve the meat as a roast, adding water to the gravy and thickening if necessary.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

  5. Pork + thymetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Lower round steak
Provides the main cut of meat that becomes tender during slow, moist cooking.
Salt pork or beef fat
Adds fat for browning the meat and carries flavor into the gravy.
Flour
Browns in the fat and thickens the liquid into gravy.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and savory depth to the gravy.

The step that matters

Let the flour brown slightly. Cooking flour in fat until lightly browned develops a nutty flavor and color, and removes raw starch taste before liquid is added. Browning too far can make the gravy bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, parsley, thyme, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, parsley, thyme, flour. 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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