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Beef Fricassee

A beef fricassee made with flank steak, onions, and a flour‑thickened stock, served over biscuits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and biscuit work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 428 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Fricassee

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. Simmer the flank steak in water to cover with the onion, salt, and pepper until very tender.

  2. Trim off the fat from half the meat and cut it into one-inch pieces.

Make the fricassee

  1. Thicken two cups of the stock with the flour and reheat the meat in this mixture.

  2. Add more seasoning if needed.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over split baking-powder biscuits.

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 + biscuittop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together428 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + biscuittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together841 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Flank steak
Provides the meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Thickens the cooking stock into a smooth sauce that clings to the meat.

The step that matters

Simmering the flank steak until very tender. Flank is a lean, fibrous cut that needs slow, moist heat to break down its connective tissue. Cooking it too briefly leaves it tough, so it should be checked for tenderness before moving on.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, flour, biscuit):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, biscuit. 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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