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Beef a LA Mode

Beef à la Mode is a baked beef dish stuffed with salt pork and dressing, then browned and served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Beef a LA Mode

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Remove all bone, gristle, and tough parts from the beef.

  2. Make perpendicular incisions in the meat about 1-2 inches apart.

  3. Cut the salt pork into strips about the thickness of your finger.

  4. Stuff each incision with strips of pork and some dressing until the meat is thoroughly filled.

Bake and finish

  1. Place the beef in a baking pan with a little water and cover tightly.

  2. Bake for 4 to 5 hours.

  3. Spread the remaining dressing over the top and return to the oven to brown.

  4. Thicken the gravy with flour and pour it over the beef.

  5. Cut into slices and serve hot or cold.

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

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

  2. Pork + turkeytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together830 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Beef + turkeytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together248 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Turkey + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together963 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Round of beef
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender through long, slow moist cooking.
Salt pork
Its fat melts into the meat during baking, adding moisture and rich flavor.
Dressing
Fills the incisions and browns on top, adding flavor and moisture to the meat.
Flour
Thickens the pan juices into a gravy that coats the sliced beef.

The step that matters

Covered baking with a little water. Long baking of a tough cut needs moist, covered heat so collagen breaks down slowly into gelatin rather than the meat drying out and toughening.

“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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