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Stewed Steak

A stew of round steak with onions, carrots, turnips, and catsup, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the meat and vegetables

  1. Brown the round steak in butter in a frying pan, but do not cook it through.

  2. Transfer the steak to a stew pan.

  3. Dice the onion, carrot, and turnips.

  4. Fry the diced vegetables in the frying pan until browned.

  5. Add the browned vegetables to the stew pan with enough water to cover the steak.

Stew and finish

  1. Let it stew for 2 hours.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Thicken the stew with flour dissolved in a little catsup or sauce.

  4. Serve with mashed potatoes.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Round steak
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during long, slow stewing.
Butter
Fat for the initial browning, adding color and savory flavor to the meat and vegetables.
Onion
Browns and softens during frying, adding sweetness and aroma to the stew.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a richer, looser gravy.
Catsup or sauce
Adds tangy, savory flavor to the stew and carries the flour for thickening.

The step that matters

Browning the steak without cooking it through. Searing creates browned flavor on the surface, but the meat must stay partly raw inside because it will keep cooking during the long stew. Overcooking now leaves it dry and tough later.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, carrot, turnip, pepper, flour, sauce):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, turnip, pepper, flour, sauce. 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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