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Beef Olives with Brussels Sprouts

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Beef Olives with Brussels Sprouts

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the beef into slices about ½ inch thick and 3-4 inches long.

  2. Beat the slices flat with a rolling pin dipped in water.

  3. Trim the beef slices and place a piece of forcemeat on each.

  4. Roll them up and tie with cotton.

  5. Place in a stewpan, pour over the gravy, cover, and simmer gently for 1 to 1½ hours until tender.

  6. Remove the olives and discard the cotton.

  7. Keep the olives warm on a hot dish.

  8. Thicken the gravy with flour, stir until it boils, and cook for 3 to 4 minutes.

  9. Pour the gravy over the olives.

  10. Cook the Brussels sprouts as you would other green vegetables and place them in the center of the olives.

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. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + brussels sproutstop 35% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-3-hexenal (green, grassy).

  3. Beef + brussels sproutstop 43% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

Swap the brussels sprouts

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Brussels sproutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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