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Italian Rump Steaks

A stew of rump steaks with onions, carrots, turnip, and a butter‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Italian Rump Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Lightly brown the steak in a frying pan.

  2. Rub flour into the butter until it is fully absorbed.

  3. Stick cloves into the onion.

  4. Tie the onion in muslin.

  5. Brown the carrots and turnip.

  6. Cut them into rounds.

  7. Mix the warm water with the butter and flour mixture.

Simmer

  1. Place the steak and vegetables in a stew pan.

  2. Pour the liquid over them.

  3. Simmer slowly for 2 to 3 hours.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + turniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Steak
Browning gives flavour, and slow simmering turns the tough meat tender.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and with flour forms a base that thickens the liquid.
Flour
Mixed with butter, it helps thicken the cooking liquid into a light sauce.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness to the stock as it simmers in the pot.
Carrots
Browning adds caramelised sweetness, and they soften and sweeten the stew.
Turnip
Browning adds mild sweetness, and it softens during the long simmer.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly for 2 to 3 hours. Low, gentle heat breaks down the connective tissue in rump steak slowly. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can make the liquid cloudy.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

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