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Beef a LA Mode

A beef dish marinated with pork fat strips, cloves, peppercorns, bay leaf, carrots, turnip, onion, vinegar, and water, then fried and braised.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef a LA Mode

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Make holes in the beef with a sharp instrument and insert strips of salt fat pork, running them with the grain. Let the ends of the pork strips project.

  2. Place the meat in a bowl with cloves, peppercorns, bay leaf, carrots, turnip, and onion.

  3. Cover with vinegar and water and let it marinate for several hours, preferably 2 to 3 days.

  4. Remove the meat from the marinade.

Brown and cook

  1. Fry the meat brown in drippings.

  2. Add flour to the meat. Turn the meat over to coat with flour.

  3. Cover the browned meat with hot water.

  4. Cook the meat slowly. Add coarse sea salt when the meat is half done.

  5. Cook for about 30 minutes per pound.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  3. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + turniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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, becoming tender through long slow cooking.
Salt fat pork strips
Melt during cooking, adding fat and moisture that keep the lean beef juicy.
Vinegar
Acidity in the marinade helps tenderize the surface of the meat.
Flour
Coats the browned meat, helping thicken the cooking liquid into a sauce and adding browning.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the braising liquid as they soften.
Onion
Adds savory depth and aroma to the braising liquid as it softens.

The step that matters

Cook the meat slowly. Long, gentle heat breaks down the tough connective tissue in round beef into gelatin, making the meat tender. High heat toughens the muscle fibers and dries the meat out.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, carrot, turnip, onion, vinegar, flour):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, carrot, turnip, onion, vinegar, flour. 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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