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Braised Beef

Braised beef with salt pork, onions, carrot, turnip, herbs, and optional tomatoes, cooked slowly in oven.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Braised Beef

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 ↓

Braised Beef

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the pan

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. In a braising pan, place 6 slices of salt pork and heat until it begins to fry.

  3. Add the onions, carrot, and turnip; cook until they begin to brown.

  4. Move the vegetables to one side and add the beef, dredged in salt, pepper, and flour; brown on all sides.

Braise and serve

  1. Pour in the boiling water and add the bouquet of herbs; cover and cook slowly in the oven for 4 hours, basting every 20 minutes.

  2. Remove the beef, thicken the gravy, and pour it over the meat to serve.

  3. For a variation, add ½ can of tomatoes to the gravy, cook for 10 minutes, strain, and pour 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Carrot + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef round or rump
Forms the main body of the dish; slow braising turns its connective tissue tender and moist.
Flour
Dredged on the beef, it browns during searing and helps thicken the gravy.
Salt pork
Renders fat into the pan for frying and browning, adding savory flavor to the braise.
Onions
Browned with the carrot and turnip, they build sweetness and savory depth in the gravy.
Tomatoes
Optional variation; adds acidity and color to the gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the beef on all sides. Searing builds deep, roasted flavor through the Maillard reaction. Pale meat gives a flatter gravy, so the beef needs real color before the liquid goes in.

Swap the tomato

The recipe marks tomato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, onion, carrot, turnip, pepper, flour):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, onion, carrot, turnip, pepper, 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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