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Cold Beef Sashed

Cold cooked beef, lightly floured and simmered with onion, sauce, ketchup and stock, then served on sippets of bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Cold Beef Sashed

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Sprinkle a little flour over the thinly sliced beef.

  2. In a stew pan, combine the chopped onion, sauce, and ketchup. Boil for 2 minutes.

  3. Add the stock or gravy and boil down to half its quantity.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the beef and boil for 5 more minutes.

  2. Serve with sippets of bread around it.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  3. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Flour + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Thinly sliced beef
Provides the main meat, which cooks briefly in the reduced sauce.
Flour
Dusted over the beef to help thicken the sauce as it cooks.
Chopped onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma as it softens in the sauce.
Stock or gravy
Forms the liquid base, which reduces to a richer, thicker sauce.

The step that matters

Boil down to half its quantity. Reducing the liquid concentrates its flavour and thickens it. Stopping too early leaves the sauce thin and watery, while over-reducing can make it salty and sticky.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, sauce, ketchup. 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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