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Beef Boll, No. 2

A rolled beef dish with sausage, bread crumbs, and a sauce of flour, water, salt, Worcestershire, and tomato catsup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Beef Boll, No. 2

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut the beef into slices ½ inch thick.

  2. Mix the sausage meat with the stale bread crumbs and spread on the beef.

  3. Roll up the beef and tie it firmly.

Brown and make the sauce

  1. In a pan, render the fat from the salt pork and brown the meat in it.

  2. Remove the meat and place it in an earthen dish.

  3. Add the flour to the fat and brown it, then add the boiling water.

  4. Boil for 5 minutes, then season with salt, Worcestershire sauce, and tomato catsup.

Cook

  1. Pour the sauce over the meat and cook for 5 hours.

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

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

  2. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 recipes

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

  3. Bread + tomatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

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

  4. Pork + tomatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,843 recipes

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

  5. Meat + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,208 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender during long, slow cooking.
Sausage meat
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the filling spread inside the beef rolls.
Stale bread crumbs
Soak up the meat juices and fat, helping bind the sausage filling.
Flour
Browned in the fat, it thickens the boiling water into a sauce.

The step that matters

Brown the meat before adding the sauce. Browning the meat in hot rendered fat creates flavour through the Maillard reaction. Skipping or rushing this leaves the dish pale and bland, and the long simmer cannot fully make up for it.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Tomatothe original
  4. Asparagusfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, meat, bread, pork, flour, sauce. 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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