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Braised Beef, with Horseradish Sauce

Braised beef simmered with onion, carrot, parsley, cloves, celery, pepper, salt, and water, served with a horseradish and cracker cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Braised Beef, with Horseradish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Braise the beef

  1. Braise the beef with the onion, carrot, parsley, cloves, celery, pepper, salt, and boiling water.

  2. Cover tightly and cook for about 3 hours, adding more boiling water if needed.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, simmer the grated cracker, horse-radish, cream, and fat from the beef for 15 minutes.

  2. Place the beef on a serving platter and pour the sauce around it.

  3. Garnish with 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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main protein; a fattier cut stays moist and tender during long, slow braising.
Grated cracker
Thickens the sauce as it simmers, giving it body.
Horse-radish
Adds the sharp, pungent heat that defines the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and mellows the bite of the horseradish.

The step that matters

Cover tightly and cook for about 3 hours. Beef is tough collagen-rich meat that needs long, moist, low heat to break down and become tender. Keeping the lid tight holds in moisture, and topping up boiling water prevents the liquid from evaporating and the meat from drying out.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, carrot, parsley, clove, pepper, horse):

  1. Celerythe original
  2. Marjoramfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, carrot, parsley, clove, pepper, horse. 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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