Skip to main content
Main

Roast Meat

Roast beef stuffed with sage, onion, and bread crumbs, seasoned with salt and pepper, served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Meat

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Boil the onion and chop it finely.

  2. Melt the dripping and dry the sage, then powder it.

  3. Mix the onion, sage, bread crumbs, pepper, and salt thoroughly.

Stuff and roast

  1. Make an opening in the meat and stuff it with the mixture.

  2. Sprinkle the meat with salt and pepper, then roast it.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. When serving, pour the dripping from the pan into a bowl.

  2. Add 1 pint of boiling water to the pan to dissolve the brown particles.

  3. Place the pan in the hottest part of the oven to boil.

  4. Pour the gravy over the meat and serve.

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. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Onion + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 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

Beef
Forms the main body of the dish and provides the meat that is roasted and carved.
Dripping
Adds fat for flavour and helps brown the meat and gravy base.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture from the onion and sage, giving the stuffing a light, cohesive texture.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma to the stuffing once boiled and finely chopped.
Sage
Contributes an herbal aroma that flavours the stuffing.

The step that matters

Place the pan in the hottest part of the oven to boil. Brown particles stuck to the pan carry concentrated flavour. Boiling the water in a very hot pan dissolves them into the gravy, so the pan should be very hot when the water goes in.

Swap the sage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, onion, bread):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, onion, bread. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes