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Spiced Pot Roast

A beef pot roast marinated with onion, bay leaf, cloves, vinegar, salt, and pepper, then browned and simmered for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Spiced Pot Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Marinate

  1. Spice the beef with onion, bay leaf, cloves, vinegar, salt, and pepper.

  2. If the vinegar is too strong, add a little water.

  3. Let the beef marinate for 24 hours.

Cook and finish

  1. Remove the spices from the beef and brown it on both sides in a pot.

  2. Add the juice and let it boil for 2 hours.

  3. Thicken the liquid with brown flour to make a good gravy.

  4. Stir in the butter 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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

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

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Provides the main body of the dish, becoming tender through long, slow cooking in liquid.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that helps tenderise the meat during the marinating time.
Brown flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the finished gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the beef on both sides. Searing the surface in a hot pot builds browned, savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pat the meat dry first, since surface moisture steams the meat instead of browning it.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, vinegar, pepper, flour, butter):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, vinegar, pepper, flour, butter. 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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