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Meat Escaloped

A baked dish of finely chopped cold beef topped with mashed potatoes and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,052 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Meat Escaloped

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Chop the cold beef finely and season it.

  2. If you don't have gravy, moisten the beef with hot water and add a little butter.

  3. Place the mixture in a baking pan and cover it with mashed potatoes.

Bake

  1. Glaze the top with butter and gash the top to let out steam before baking.

  2. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until browned nicely.

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. Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  2. Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold beef
Forms the savory meat base that the dish is built around.
Hot water
Moistens the chopped beef so it stays juicy during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the top brown as it bakes.
Mashed potatoes
Forms a soft topping that bakes into a golden crust over the beef.

The step that matters

Gashing the potato top before baking. Cuts in the potato topping let steam escape as the dish heats. Without them, trapped steam can make the topping soggy or cause it to crack unevenly.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Potatothe original
  2. Onionfits about as well
  3. Chivefits less well
  4. Tomatofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter. 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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