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Beef in Tomato Sauce

A tomato sauce with onion, cayenne, cloves, thyme, bay leaf, and corn starch, served over rare roast beef.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,108 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Beef in Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the tomato juice with the onion, cayenne, cloves, salt, thyme, and bay leaf.

  2. Stir in the corn starch mixed with cold water and boil until thickened like thin custard.

  3. Strain the sauce and pour it over slices of rare roast beef.

Heat and serve

  1. Let it stand in a hot place until the meat is thoroughly heated.

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 + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Tomato + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Tomato + corntop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomato juice
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the other flavours.
Corn starch
Thickens the boiled liquid into a smooth, custard-like sauce.
Roast beef (in the method)
Is the main food, gently reheated in the hot sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling the corn starch sauce until thickened. Cornstarch must reach a boil to swell and thicken fully; stopping early leaves the sauce thin and cloudy-tasting with raw starch. Stirring the starch in evenly beforehand prevents lumps.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, clove, thyme, corn):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, clove, thyme, corn. 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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