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To Stew Beef Steaks

A stew of beef steaks cooked with bacon, butter, brown gravy, mushrooms, cucumber, morels, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 264 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

To Stew Beef Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Season the beef steaks with white pepper, salt, and chopped shallot.

  2. Layer the steaks in a stewpan with bacon slices above and below them, and add butter.

Stew

  1. Stew over low heat for 15 minutes.

  2. Add brown gravy, pickled mushrooms, cucumber, morels, and port wine.

  3. Continue stewing until the steaks are tender.

  4. Remove the bacon and skim off the fat.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken the gravy with butter rolled in flour and serve with bread sippets.

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. Shallot + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together264 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

  3. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef steaks
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle stewing.
Bacon
Adds savoury, smoky flavour to the steaks and stew while it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and, kneaded with flour, thickens the finished gravy.
Brown gravy
Forms the sauce base that carries the flavour and moisture of the stew.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth to the sauce as it simmers.

The step that matters

Stew until the steaks are tender. Thick steaks need slow, low-heat simmering long enough for connective tissue to break down. Stopping early leaves the meat tough, and boiling hard can toughen the proteins and dry the surface.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, shallot, butter, mushroom, cucumber, port wine, bread):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, shallot, butter, mushroom, cucumber, port wine, 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.

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