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Rolled Steak

A steak rolled around forcemeat, browned, stewed, thickened with cornflour, and served with a brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Rolled Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the steak

  1. Lay the steak flat and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Place a roll of forcemeat at one end and roll the steak tightly.

  3. Bind the steak securely with twine to prevent the forcemeat from escaping.

Brown and stew

  1. Melt butter in a stewpan and brown the steak evenly on all sides.

  2. Add enough stock to half cover the steak and stew gently for two hours, turning halfway through.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Mix cornflour with water to a smooth paste and add to the gravy to thicken.

  2. Boil the sauce and season with brown sugar, pepper, and salt to taste.

  3. Serve the rolled beef on a hot dish with strained gravy over it.

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. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Pepper + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Pepper and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 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

Steak
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender during slow stewing.
Forcemeat
Fills the roll and adds savoury, moist stuffing inside the meat.
Butter
Fat that helps brown the outside of the steak before stewing.
Cornflour
Starch that thickens the stock into a smooth gravy when heated.
Sugar browning
Adds colour and a deeper, caramel-like flavour to the gravy.

The step that matters

Brown the steak evenly on all sides. Browning builds savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction, and uneven colour leaves pale patches with a flatter taste. Dry, evenly spread meat browns best, so the steak should not be crowded in the pan.

“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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