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Braised Beef

A slow‑cooked beef braise with onions, carrot, turnip, and optional tomato, finished with a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Braised Beef

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Braised Beef

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Trim and tie the beef in good shape.

  2. Rub the beef well with salt, pepper, and flour.

  3. Finely chop the onions, carrot, and turnip, then fry them in salt pork fat until light brown.

  4. Transfer the vegetables to a braising pan.

  5. Brown the meat in the frying pan, adding more fat if necessary.

Braise

  1. Place the meat in the braising pan and add boiling water and mixed herbs.

  2. Cover and bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 4 hours, basting every 20 minutes and turning after 2 hours.

  3. Once tender, remove the meat and skim the fat from the gravy.

Finish the gravy

  1. Add more salt and pepper if needed, then thicken the gravy with flour mixed in cold water.

  2. Add tomato before straining if desired.

  3. Cook for 10 minutes.

  4. Strain over the meat.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Slow braising in liquid breaks down connective tissue, leaving the meat tender and moist.
Flour
Coats the meat for browning and later thickens the cooking liquid into gravy.
Onions
Frying until light brown builds a savoury base that flavours the gravy.
Salt pork fat or dripping
Fat carries heat for browning the meat and vegetables and adds richness.
Mixed herbs
Adds aromatic flavour to the braising liquid as it cooks with the meat.

The step that matters

Browning the meat. Searing the beef in hot fat develops deep flavour through the Maillard reaction. Crowding the pan or using too little fat steams the meat instead, leaving the gravy flat.

Swap the tomato

The recipe marks tomato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, flour, onion, carrot, turnip, pork):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, flour, onion, carrot, turnip, pork. 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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