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Warmed-over Beef

A quick sauce of drippings, flour, tomatoes, stock, and seasonings, finished with chopped beef.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Warmed-over Beef

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the drippings in a pan.

  2. Add the flour and stir to combine.

  3. Gradually pour in the tomatoes and stock or water.

  4. Season with salt, paprika, and onion juice.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the chopped beef and cook for 1 minute.

  2. Serve immediately.

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 + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + beeftop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + tomatotop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,065 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

Drippings
Provide fat for cooking the flour and carrying flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the fat and liquid.
Tomatoes
Supply acidity, body and colour to the sauce.
Beef
Provides the main meat and is only warmed through briefly.

The step that matters

Adding the chopped beef. The beef is already cooked and rare, so it only needs brief heat. Cooking it too long toughens the meat and dries it out, so it should go in at the end.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Tomatothe original

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