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To Roast Beef

A rib roast of beef seasoned with salt, optionally covered with paper, finished with flour, served with potatoes, vegetables, and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and horseradish work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 171 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Roast Beef

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Remove the bones from the rib roast and roll the meat, securing it with skewers.

  3. Salt the roast generously.

Roast

  1. Place the roast in the oven, ensuring it is not too close to the fire.

  2. If the roast has a lot of fat, cover it with clean white paper to prevent it from cooking too quickly.

  3. When the roast is nearly done, remove the paper and sprinkle flour over it for a rich appearance.

Serve

  1. Serve the roast with potatoes and other vegetables, garnished with thin curls of scraped 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. Potato + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Beef + horseradishtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together491 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  5. Flour + potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 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

Rib roast of beef
Provides the main meat, whose fat renders and keeps the lean meat moist as it roasts.
Flour
Dusted on near the end, it helps form a browned, richer-looking surface.

The step that matters

Remove the paper at the right time. The paper slows surface cooking on a fatty roast. It must come off once the meat is nearly done, so the surface can brown and take on color.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Onionfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

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