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Rump Steak, Stewed

A slow‑cooked rump steak simmered with onion, pepper, salt, and stock, thickened with flour or roux, served with minced pickles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Rump Steak, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the steak

  1. Fry the steak in hot fat until lightly browned on both sides.

Stew

  1. Place the steak in a saucepan and cover with stock or water.

  2. Add the onion, pepper, and salt, then cover the saucepan tightly.

  3. Stew gently for 3 hours.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Remove the steak and strain the gravy.

  2. Thicken the gravy with flour or roux, and add ketchup if desired.

  3. Serve the steak on a hot dish, garnished with minced pickles.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Walnut + cucumbertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Onion + cucumbertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

  4. Clove + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Clove + cucumbertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,319 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Rump steak
Long gentle stewing turns this tough cut tender and moist.
Flour or roux
Starch thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, lightly bodied gravy.
Onion
Releases sweetness and aromatic flavour into the stewing liquid.
Walnut or mushroom ketchup
Adds concentrated savoury depth and umami to the gravy.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 3 hours. A rolling boil toughens meat proteins and can break the steak apart. Gentle, covered simmering slowly breaks down connective tissue, leaving the meat tender and the liquid rich.

Swap the walnut

The recipe marks walnut as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, pepper, flour, cucumber):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Black-eyed peafits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, pepper, flour, cucumber. 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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