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Stewed Steak

A stew of browned steak with onions, carrots, turnips, ketchup, caper liquor, and butter‑flour gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Steak

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the steak in butter until browned.

  2. Put the steak into a stewpan with water, onion, ketchup, caper liquor, pepper, and salt.

  3. Cover the pan tightly and let it stew slowly.

  4. Thicken the gravy with a piece of butter rolled in flour.

  5. Serve with stewed carrots and turnips on a hot dish.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  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. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Provides the main meat, which browns and then becomes tender during slow stewing.
Butter
Fat for browning the steak, adding richness and flavour to the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks with the butter.
Onion
Adds savoury aroma and body to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Cover the pan tightly and let it stew slowly. Gentle, covered simmering keeps the liquid from evaporating and lets the connective tissue in the steak break down slowly, so the meat turns tender rather than tough.

Swap the onion

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

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

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