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Braised Steak a LA Coney Island

Braised steak cooked with onions, carrots, turnips, mace, nutmeg, clove, and flour, served hot with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Braised Steak a LA Coney Island

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the steak in butter until rich brown.

  2. Place the steak in a saucepan covered with water.

  3. Add onion, carrots, turnips, mace, nutmeg, clove, salt, and pepper.

  4. Simmer gently for 2 hours.

  5. Thicken the sauce with flour.

  6. Serve on a hot dish garnished with chopped parsley.

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. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Provides the main protein, which browns on the outside and becomes tender during long simmering.
Butter
Fat that carries the initial frying and helps the steak develop a rich brown crust.
Onion
Adds savory aromatic flavor to the cooking liquid as it softens and sweetens.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the sauce as they soften during simmering.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smoother, more cohesive sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 2 hours. A gentle simmer keeps the meat tender and the liquid clear. Boiling vigorously toughens muscle fibers and can make the sauce cloudy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, carrot, turnip, nutmeg, clove, pepper):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, carrot, turnip, nutmeg, clove, pepper. 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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