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Roast Beef and Potatoes

Roast beef and potatoes cooked together in the oven with salt pork and flour.

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 ↓

Roast Beef and Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Pat the sirloin and place it in the oven, timing according to its size.

  3. Peel the potatoes and place them around the beef in the pan.

  4. If the potatoes are large, cut them in half lengthwise.

Roast

  1. For veal, place 4 pounds of veal in the pan and top with 2 slices of salt pork.

  2. Baste the veal with a little flour and coarse sea salt.

  3. Cook the beef for 1.5 hours and the veal for 2 hours on the lower shelf.

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. Potato + porktop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Sirloin of beef
Provides the main meat, whose size and thickness set the roasting time.
Potatoes
Absorb the meat drippings and brown at the edges as they roast.
Salt pork
Adds fat that bastes the meat and flavors the pan juices.
Flour
Helps the surface of the veal brown and form a crust.

The step that matters

Timing the beef by its size. Thicker cuts take longer for heat to reach the centre, so cooking by size rather than by a fixed time helps prevent an overcooked outside or a raw middle.

“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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