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Roast Beef

A beef roast cooked in a pan with water, salt, pepper, flour, butter, and served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Roast Beef

Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Roast Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Roast the beef

  1. Place the beef roast in a roasting pan.

  2. Pour 1 cup of boiling water over the roast.

  3. Roast, basting often, for 15 minutes per pound.

  4. Season the roast with salt and pepper.

  5. Dredge the roast with flour.

  6. Baste the roast with butter.

Make the gravy

  1. Remove excess fat to make gravy.

  2. Thicken the drippings with browned flour.

  3. Boil the gravy.

  4. Serve the gravy.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Beef roast
Provides the main meat, and its rendered fat and juices form the drippings used for gravy.
Flour
Dredging browns the surface, and browned flour thickens the drippings into gravy.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches flavor and helps the roast brown as it bastes.

The step that matters

Thicken the drippings with browned flour. Flour must be cooked in the fat until browned, which removes its raw starchy taste. Whisked into the drippings and simmered, the starch swells and thickens the gravy evenly, while adding flour to cold liquid tends to form lumps.

“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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