Skip to main content
Main

Minced Beef

A dish of sliced sirloin steak cooked with red peppers, butter, water, and red wine, finished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Minced Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut the sirloin steak into 12 thin slices and dust with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

Cook the peppers and beef

  1. Halve the Spanish red peppers and fry them in hot butter for 2 minutes on each side.

  2. Remove the peppers to a hot plate.

  3. Fry the beef slices in the same pan for 1 minute on each side.

  4. Remove the beef and arrange on a hot dish, overlapping the pieces.

  5. Place the fried peppers on top of the beef and sprinkle with chopped parsley.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Remove excess fat from the pan, add water and red wine, season with pepper and salt, and boil for 5 minutes.

  2. Pour the sauce over the beef and serve.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Butter + red winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,599 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Pepper + red winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Red wine + parsleytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together716 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Sirloin steak
Provides the meat, which cooks quickly in thin slices and stays tender when briefly fried.
Spanish red peppers
Soften and sweeten as they fry in butter, adding flavour and colour to the dish.
Butter
Conducts heat in the pan and browns the surfaces of the peppers and beef, adding flavour.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth to the pan sauce as it reduces with the pan juices.

The step that matters

Boiling the pan sauce. Boiling for the stated time reduces the liquid and concentrates the flavour. Removing excess fat first keeps the sauce from tasting greasy.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, red wine):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Rosemaryfits about as well
  3. Clovefits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, red wine. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes