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Pot Roast

A pot roast made with beef tongue, tomatoes, peppers, onion, garlic, and a sauce served over macaroni.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Pot Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Trim off all the fat from the beef tongue and place it in a kettle with the tomatoes and coarse sea salt.

  2. Heat the oil in a frying pan and add the chopped peppers, onion, and minced garlic. Cook until browned.

  3. Add the browned mixture to the kettle with the meat and tomatoes. Cook for three hours.

Make the macaroni

  1. Cook the macaroni in a separate kettle for twenty minutes.

  2. Combine the cooked macaroni with the sauce from the meat.

  3. Add grated cheese and mix well.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 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 tongue
Long, slow cooking in liquid breaks down its tough connective tissue into tender meat.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and moisture, forming the liquid that becomes the sauce.
Onion
Browning in oil builds savory, sweet flavor that carries into the sauce.
Peppers
Browning softens them and adds savory, slightly sweet flavor to the sauce.
Grated cheese
Melts into the sauce and macaroni, adding fat and rich, savory flavor.
Macaroni
Starch that absorbs the sauce and gives the dish its body.

The step that matters

Cook the tongue for three hours. Tongue is tough and needs long, gentle cooking in liquid for the connective tissue to break down. Cooking too briefly or at a hard boil leaves the meat chewy and dry.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, tomato, onion, pepper, garlic, sauce, cheese):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Oreganofits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, tomato, onion, pepper, garlic, sauce, cheese. 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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