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Stewed Steak

A slow‑cooked steak with vegetables, thickened with flour and flavored with catsup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the meat and vegetables

  1. Brown the round steak in butter in a frying pan, but do not cook it through.

  2. Transfer the steak to a stew pan.

  3. In the frying pan, brown the diced onion, carrot, and turnips.

  4. Add the browned vegetables to the stew pan with enough water to cover the steak.

Stew and finish

  1. Let it stew for 2 hours.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Thicken the stew with flour dissolved in a little catsup or sauce.

  4. Serve with mashed potatoes.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 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

Round steak
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during long, slow stewing.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, body-rich gravy.
Butter
Adds fat for browning the steak and vegetables, building savory flavor.
Onion
Browning softens and sweetens the onion, adding savory depth to the stew.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and body as they soften during stewing.

The step that matters

Browning the steak without cooking it through. Browning creates savory flavor through the Maillard reaction. Cooking the steak fully here would leave it dry and tough by the end of the long stew.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, carrot, turnip, pepper, flour, sauce):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, turnip, pepper, flour, sauce. 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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