Name: Hashed Beef on Toast
Ingredients: cold roast beef, chopped fine; coarse sea salt; black pepper; 2 tablespoons flour; ½ cup soup stock or water; butter (optional); 6 slices of bread

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Hashed Beef on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

Chop the cold roast beef finely and season with salt and pepper.
For each pint of meat, add 2 tablespoons of flour and stir well.
Add ½ cup of soup stock or water to the mixture.

Cook and serve

Put the mixture in a small saucepan, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, toast 6 slices of bread until golden.
After 20 minutes, spread the beef mixture on the toast.
If using water instead of soup stock, add 1 tablespoon of butter before spreading the beef.
Serve immediately on a hot dish.

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.

Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,032 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).
Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cold roast beef: Provides the meat that is chopped and warmed through in the sauce.
Flour: Thickens the stock or water into a binding sauce that holds the beef together.
Soup stock: Adds savoury flavour to the beef mixture as its cooking liquid.
Bread: Forms the toasted base that the hot beef mixture is spread over.

“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.