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Savoury Meat Dishes

A slow‑cooked stew of steak with carrot, turnip, onion, celery, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Savoury Meat Dishes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Trim all fat from the steak.

  2. Heat the dripping in a stewpan and fry the steak until browned.

Simmer

  1. Add the vegetables and pour in the water, seasoning with pepper and salt.

  2. Simmer gently for 3 to 4 hours until the steak is tender.

Thicken and serve

  1. Remove the steak from the gravy and place it on a hot dish.

  2. Make a thickening with the flour, stir it into the gravy, boil for 2 minutes, and strain over the steak.

  3. Optionally, add a little mushroom catsup, Harvey sauce, or Worcestershire sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, slow simmering.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it is stirred in and boiled.
Dripping
Fat used for frying the steak, adding richness and browning.
Onion
Adds aromatic flavour to the gravy as it simmers.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 3 to 4 hours. Low, gentle heat breaks down the tough connective tissue in the steak slowly, making it tender. A hard boil can toughen the meat and cloud the gravy, so keep the liquid at a quiet simmer until the steak is tender.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, flour, pepper):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, flour, 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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