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Beef a LA Mode

A roasted beef seasoned with ginger, mace, allspice, cloves, coriander, salt, pepper, vinegar, larded with bacon, stuffed, and cooked with wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Beef a LA Mode

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Hang the beef until quite tender.

  2. Spread a mixture of spices over the beef, moistened with vinegar, the day before cooking.

  3. Fill the hole where the bone was with a seasoned stuffing of breadcrumbs, suet, parsley, thyme, and onion.

  4. Skewer and shape the beef.

  5. Lard the beef with strips of fat bacon.

Cook

  1. Place the beef on a small tripod in a baking dish and put it in the oven.

  2. Baste the meat continually with lard and gravy.

  3. Half an hour before the meat is done, pour over it ½ tumbler of red wine mixed with 1 tablespoon of flour.

  4. Cook for four to five 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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Ginger + coriandertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Allspice + coriandertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef round
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender during long, slow cooking.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth to the gravy as it cooks down with the meat.
Flour
Thickens the red wine mixture into a richer gravy.
Fat bacon
Lardoons add fat that keeps the lean beef moist during cooking.
Vinegar
Moistens the spice mixture and helps it penetrate the meat.

The step that matters

Basting with lard and gravy. Lean beef dries out over several hours in the oven. Regular basting moistens the surface and helps build a flavorful gravy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, ginger, allspice, clove, coriander, pepper, vinegar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, ginger, allspice, clove, coriander, pepper, vinegar. 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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