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A braised beef back rib cooked with cloves, flour, stock, and served with horseradish garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Meat Dishes

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the meat

  1. Heat the butter or beef dripping in a stewpan until smoking hot.

  2. Stick the cloves into the meat and fry it until browned on all sides.

  3. Remove the meat and fry the flour until brown.

Make the sauce and cook

  1. Add the stock, season with salt and pepper, and bring to a boil.

  2. Return the meat to the pan, cover, and simmer gently for about 2 hours until tender.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat with the sauce poured over it and garnish with grated horseradish.

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. Clove + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Flour + horseradishtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together743 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Back rib of beef
Provides the main cut that becomes tender and rich during slow simmering.
Flour
Browned in the fat to form a roux that thickens the sauce.
Butter or beef dripping
Carries heat for browning the meat and adds savoury flavour to the crust.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and moistens the meat as it simmers.
Cloves
Add a warm, aromatic spice flavour that penetrates the meat during cooking.

The step that matters

Browning the meat in smoking-hot fat. Searing creates browned surface flavour through the Maillard reaction. Fat that is not hot enough steams the meat instead, leaving a pale, bland crust.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, clove, flour, pepper, 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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