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Boasted Beef

A roast beef cooked in an oven, served without gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 139 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boasted Beef

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the beef

  1. Place the beef on sticks in a roasting pan, ensuring it does not touch the water at the bottom.

  2. Season the beef with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  3. Do not salt the beef until it is taken off the spit.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 3 to 4 hours, basting often with the water in the pan.

  2. Wrap the beef in white paper and remove it 15 minutes before serving.

  3. Serve the beef on a large dish without gravy or garnish, or with them served separately.

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. Cauliflower + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together139 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Cauliflower + beanstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Potato + beanstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together655 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Forms the main dish, and slow roasting with basting keeps it moist and tender.
Black pepper
Adds sharp, aromatic heat to the beef's outer crust.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the beef surface and helps build a flavourful crust.

Swap the brussels sprouts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, potato, cauliflower, beans, parsley, horseradish):

  1. Broccolifits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Brussels sproutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, potato, cauliflower, beans, parsley, horseradish. 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.

More roast beef recipes

Cold Fricassee 21Fillet 16with Yorkshire Pudding 15Pie 14Steak 10Pot 9 See all 303 →

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