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Brown Fricassee of Beef

A slow‑cooked beef fricassee with pork fat, flour, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, and onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Brown Fricassee of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Brown the beef

  1. Dredge the beef pieces with flour, season with salt and pepper, and brown in the fat salt pork.

  2. Remove the beef and add 2 tablespoons of flour to the fat, browning it.

  3. Add 1 pint of boiling water, Worcestershire sauce, tomato ketchup, and onion to the pan.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture over the beef in an earthen dish.

  2. Cook for 5 hours at 300°F (150°C).

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Shin of beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during long, slow cooking.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy and helps the beef brown.
Fat salt pork
Supplies fat for browning the beef and adds savoury flavour to the dish.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in the fat. Cooking the flour until lightly browned develops a nutty flavour and colour, and removes raw starch taste before the boiling water is added to form a smooth gravy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, flour, pepper, sauce, tomato, ketchup):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, flour, pepper, sauce, tomato, ketchup. 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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