Skip to main content
Main

Pot Roast

A pot roast made with beef or pork, onions, carrot, celery root, and browned in butter and lard, simmered for 2.5 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Pot Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Season the roast with salt, pepper, and flour.

  2. In a small pan, brown the sliced onion in 1 tablespoon of flour and 1 tablespoon of butter.

Brown and braise

  1. In a deep pot, heat 4 tablespoons of butter and 4 tablespoons of lard.

  2. Add the roast and brown it on each side.

  3. Add the browned onion, chopped carrot, and celery root.

  4. Half cover the roast with water and let it steam for 2.5 hours.

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. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

Roast
Its connective tissue breaks down slowly during steaming, leaving the meat tender and moist.
Flour
Coats the meat and onion so they brown well and help thicken the cooking liquid.
Butter
Adds fat for browning and a rich, savory flavor.
Lard
Adds fat with a high smoke point for searing the roast without burning.
Onion
Browns to add sweetness and savory depth to the braising liquid.

The step that matters

Browning the roast on each side. Browning creates flavorful compounds through the Maillard reaction. Pale meat tastes flat, so the surface needs deep color before adding water.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, pepper, butter, carrot, celery. 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.

More pot roast recipes

Beef 9Beef 5Mutton 4Veal 4Chicken 3Veal 3 See all 137 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes