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Staffordshire Beefsteak

A stew of beefsteak with onions, flour, sea salt, and ketchup, simmered in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and ketchup are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,435 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Staffordshire Beefsteak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the beefsteak lightly with a rolling pin.

  2. Season with flour and coarse sea salt.

  3. Fry the onions until light brown.

Stew and serve

  1. Place the steaks in a stew pan and cover with boiling water.

  2. Stew gently for 30 minutes.

  3. Add ketchup before serving.

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. Flour + ketchuptop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Flour + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + ketchuptop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Beefsteak
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through gentle stewing.
Flour
Coats the meat, helping it brown and lightly thickening the cooking liquid.
Onions
Add sweetness and savour as they soften and brown in the pan.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness, acidity and a tomato flavour to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 30 minutes. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil lets the connective tissue in the beef break down slowly, so the meat turns tender instead of tough and stringy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, ketchup. 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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