Skip to main content
Main

Beef a LA Mode

A roast beef dish with larding pork, vinegar, vegetables, and piquante sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

  1. Lard the beef with seasoned strips of larding pork.

  2. Marinate the beef in dilute vinegar with carrot, turnip, onion, and whole spices for several hours.

Cook

  1. Quickly roast the beef in the oven to sear the outside.

  2. Place the beef in a saucepan, cover with piquante sauce, and simmer gently until tender.

Serve

  1. Serve in slices with a garnish of braised vegetables and some of the cooking sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Larding pork
Adds fat and moisture inside the lean beef as it cooks.
Dilute vinegar
Its acidity softens the surface of the meat during marinating.
Piquante sauce
Its liquid braises the beef and flavours the sauce served with it.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until tender. Boiling vigorously toughens meat proteins and drives off moisture. A gentle simmer lets collagen slowly break down into gelatin, giving tender, moist slices.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Carrotthe original

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

More beef à la mode recipes

French 3 See all 169 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipes