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Stewed Rump Steaks

Stewed rump steaks simmered with onions, spices, and a thickened ketchup sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and basil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,294 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Stewed Rump Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Sear and prepare

  1. Melt 1 ounce of butter in a frying pan over medium heat and fry the steaks for 5 minutes on each side until light brown.

  2. Transfer the steaks to a clean stew pan.

Make the onion gravy

  1. Melt another ounce of butter in the same frying pan and sauté the chopped onions with 2 teaspoons of flour until light brown.

  2. Add 1 cup of boiling water to the onions, stir well, and let it boil for 5 minutes.

  3. Pour the onion mixture over the steaks in the stew pan.

Stew, thicken and serve

  1. Sprinkle the steaks with black pepper, allspice, cayenne pepper, salt, and sweet basil, then add 1 quart of boiling water.

  2. Cover and let it stew gently for 1.5 hours.

  3. To thicken the sauce, remove 3-4 tablespoons of gravy and mix it with 1 tablespoon of flour and 1 tablespoon of ketchup in a bowl.

  4. Stir the mixture back into the stew and let it simmer for an additional 15 minutes.

  5. Serve the steaks on a hot dish, pour the sauce over them through a fine sieve, and accompany with pickles and scraped horseradish.

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 + basiltop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,294 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Allspice + basiltop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together195 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

What each ingredient does

Steaks
The main protein; slow stewing softens its connective tissue so it becomes tender.
Onion
Softens and browns, adding sweetness and savory depth to the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks with the fat and liquid.
Butter
Fat that browns the steaks and onions, adding rich flavor.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity that deepen the flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce. Flour mixed into hot gravy in a separate bowl disperses evenly before it is stirred back in, which helps prevent lumps and gives a smooth, evenly thickened sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, allspice, basil, ketchup):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, allspice, basil, ketchup. 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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