Skip to main content
Main

Beef Steak Stewed in Its Own Gravy

A beef steak stew cooked slowly in its own gravy with pepper, flour, salt, catsup, and spice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,459 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Beef Steak Stewed in Its Own Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the steak

  1. Trim all fat and skin from the steak and cut it into pieces.

  2. Dip the steak in cold water and let it drain.

  3. Sprinkle both sides with pepper and coat with flour.

Cook

  1. Place the steak in a well-tinned saucepan with a tablespoon of cold water.

  2. Cook over a gentle fire, simmering for 1.5 to 1.75 hours until tender.

  3. Add salt when it begins to boil and turn it when more than half done.

  4. For added flavor, mix in gravy, catsup, and a slight seasoning of spice.

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. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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

Rump steak
Provides the meat that becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Coats the steak and helps thicken the liquid into a gravy-like sauce.
Gravy
Adds savory depth and moisture to the stew.

The step that matters

Cook over a gentle fire. Simmering gently keeps the meat's connective tissue breaking down slowly into tenderness. A rapid boil toughens muscle fibres and can make the meat dry and stringy.

“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.

More beef stew recipes

with Dumplings 30Brazilian 20French 20Spiced 17Pudding 16English 15 See all 357 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes