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Beef Ragout

A slow‑cooked beef ragout with carrots, onions, capers, and Worcestershire sauce, served with mashed potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beef Ragout

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pan, heat the beef dripping and fry the sliced carrots and onions until slightly brown.

  2. Add the stock and the sliced beef to the pan.

  3. Stir in the capers and Worcestershire sauce, then season with pepper and salt.

  4. Cook slowly for one hour.

  5. Serve with a border of mashed potatoes.

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

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

  2. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Onion + caperstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 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 dripping
Provides fat for frying the vegetables and builds a savoury browned base.
Stock
Supplies liquid that moistens the beef and forms the ragout sauce during slow cooking.
Cold roast beef
Forms the main meat, which softens and absorbs flavour as it simmers in the sauce.
Button onions
Soften and turn sweeter as they brown, adding depth to the sauce.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the sauce as they cook down.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savoury, slightly tangy flavour that rounds out the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for one hour. Gentle, low heat keeps the beef tender rather than tough and dry, and lets the stock reduce and flavours blend. Rapid boiling toughens meat proteins and can make the sauce too thick or scorched.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, carrot, sauce, pepper):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, carrot, sauce, pepper. 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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