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Beef a LA Mode

A slow‑cooked beef stew with onions, turnips, and potatoes, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beef a LA Mode

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the beef and place it in a roasting pan.

  2. Sprinkle the beef well with coarse sea salt.

  3. Pare the onions and slice the turnips thin.

  4. Lay the sliced turnips and onions around the meat.

Cook

  1. Pour cold water over all ingredients.

  2. Cook for about 3 hours.

  3. Pare the potatoes and add them 1½ hours before serving.

  4. As the water cooks away, add more as needed.

  5. Thicken the gravy with a little flour blended smooth in cold water.

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 + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Turnip + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together562 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

Beef
Long cooking breaks down the tough connective tissue, leaving the meat tender and flavourful.
Onions
Break down during the long cook, adding sweetness and depth to the gravy.
White turnips
Hold their shape during the long cook and add a mild, slightly peppery flavour to the stew.
Potatoes
Soften as they cook and help thicken the liquid with their starch.
Flour
Starch that thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth gravy when blended in cold water first.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy with flour blended in cold water. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps, because its starch grains swell unevenly. Blending it smooth in cold water first lets the starch disperse so the gravy thickens evenly.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, 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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