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Pot Roast

A slow-cooked roast with potatoes or turnips in a pot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sweet potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,015 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pot Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the roast

  1. Heat 1 tablespoon of meat fryings or butter in an iron pot until browned.

  2. Wash the roast.

  3. Place the roast in the pot.

  4. Add enough water to half cover the meat once it starts to fry.

  5. Season the roast with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Stew the roast

  1. Cover the pot.

  2. Stew slowly.

  3. Add more water as the meat fries.

  4. Turn the pot often.

  5. Cook for about 3 hours.

Add the vegetables

  1. Add Irish or sweet potatoes or turnips half an hour before serving.

  2. Let them brown with 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.

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. Pepper + sweet potatotop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,015 recipes

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

  2. Meat + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,777 recipes

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

  3. Meat + sweet potatotop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together60 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Any kind of meat
Provides the main substance; slow stewing turns its connective tissue tender.
Meat fryings or butter
Fat that browns the surface of the meat and adds rich flavour.
Irish or sweet potatoes or turnips
Absorb cooking juices and brown alongside the meat for added sweetness.

The step that matters

Browning the roast in the pot. Searing the meat until browned before adding water builds deep flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale meat will taste flat after stewing.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, 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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