Why it works: Horse and radish work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 529 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓
Roasting Beef
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Clean the spit with sand and water, then dry it with a cloth.
If storing the beef before cooking, dry it with a cloth, flour it, and hang it in a dry place.
Roast
Cover the top of the beef with paper and baste it well while roasting.
Sprinkle a handful of coarse sea salt on the beef.
When smoke draws to the fire, remove the paper.
Baste the beef.
Dredge the beef for a nice froth.
Do not salt the meat before roasting to retain the gravy.
Roast a 12-pound piece for 2.5 hours or a 20-pound piece for 3 hours at a clear, quick fire.
Adjust cooking time based on the thickness of the meat and weather conditions.
Serve
Garnish the cooked beef with scraped horse-radish and serve with gravy.
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.
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Horse + radishtop 4% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together529 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).
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Beef + horsetop 8% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together81 recipes
Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
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Beef + radishtop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together97 recipes
Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Beef
- Forms the main body of the dish, and its size sets the cooking time.
- Coarse sea salt
- Seasons the surface of the beef as it roasts.
The step that matters
Remove the paper when smoke draws to the fire. The paper protects the surface early on, but leaving it on too long stops the beef from browning. Removing it at the right moment lets the surface brown and develop flavour.
Swap the radish
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, horse):
- Radishthe original
- Mustardfits about as well
- Onionfits less well
- Potatofits less well
Fit is the average pairing score against beef, horse. 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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