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Beef-steak with Vegetables

A stew of a browned steak simmered with turnips, carrots, celery, onions, pepper, sea salt, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Beef-steak with Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the steak

  1. Dredge the steak with flour.

  2. Fry the steak in butter until browned.

Make the stew

  1. Place the steak in a stewpan.

  2. Pour water from the frying pan into the stewpan.

  3. Bring the liquid to a boil.

  4. Add sliced turnips, carrots, celery, and onions to the stewpan.

  5. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, and a little mace.

Serve

  1. Garnish with shaped carrots and turnips before serving.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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

Steak
Provides the meat that becomes tender and rich as the stew simmers.
Flour
Coats the steak so it browns well and helps thicken the cooking liquid.
Butter
Fat for frying that browns the steak and adds flavour.
Turnips
Vegetables that soften in the stew and add body and mild sweetness.
Carrots
Vegetables that soften in the stew and add body and natural sweetness.
Onions
Soften during simmering and add savoury depth to the broth.

The step that matters

Fry the steak in butter until browned. Browning through the flour-dredged surface creates savoury flavour compounds through the Maillard reaction. Pale meat tastes flat, and the browned bits left in the pan also add flavour to the stew liquid.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, turnip, carrot, celery, onion, pepper):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, turnip, carrot, celery, onion, pepper. 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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