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Poui Alamode Beef

A spiced beef simmered with onions, thickened with flour and catsup, optionally flavored with claret or Madeira.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Poui Alamode Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut deep gashes in the beef.

  2. Rub the beef with salt, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, mace, pepper, and flour.

  3. Fill the gashes with turkey dressing and chopped onion.

  4. Sew the gashes closed.

  5. Bind the beef with cotton cloth.

Simmer and finish

  1. Place the beef in a covered kettle with a whole onion and enough cold water to cover it.

  2. Simmer for 3 hours.

  3. Make a thickening with 4 tablespoons of flour.

  4. Stir the thickening into the beef along with 2 tablespoons of catsup.

  5. Simmer for 1 hour longer, optionally adding claret or Madeira for extra flavor.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Round beef
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender through long, slow simmering.
Flour
Coats the meat and later thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy.
Mushroom or walnut catsup
Adds concentrated savory, tangy flavor to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Simmer for 3 hours. Long, gentle simmering breaks down the tough connective tissue in round beef so it becomes tender. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and leave it dry, so keep the liquid at a steady, low simmer.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, cinnamon, clove, allspice, pepper, flour, onion):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, cinnamon, clove, allspice, pepper, flour, onion. 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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