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To Dress Cold Roast Beef

A sauce for cold roast beef made with flour, butter, onion, parsley, lemon thyme, gravy, vinegar, mushroom catsup, topped with poached eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

To Dress Cold Roast Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Make the beef

  1. Dredge the diced beef with flour.

  2. Fry the beef in butter for 3-4 minutes with the onion, parsley, and lemon thyme.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a saucepan.

  4. Add the well-seasoned gravy, vinegar, and mushroom catsup.

  5. Simmer for 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve topped with poached eggs.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 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
Provides the main meat and savory flavor of the dish.
Flour
Coats the beef so it browns and helps thicken the gravy.
Butter
Fries the beef and onion, adding richness and browning.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth as it cooks down.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy.
Poached eggs
Add soft, runny yolk that enriches the sauce when broken.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, butter, parsley, lemon, thyme, vinegar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, butter, parsley, lemon, thyme, vinegar. 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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