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Beef a LA Mode

A beef stew with calf's feet, carrots, onions, and optional garlic, leek, celery, simmered in wine and seasoned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Beef a LA Mode

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Boil the beef in water, adding cold water as needed to control scum.

  2. Remove scum before adding vegetables.

  3. Add the calf's feet, carrots, and onions to the pot.

  4. Cook until tender, then strain the gravy through a fine sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove all grease and reduce the gravy over heat by a quarter.

  2. Place the beef on a serving dish, arrange the calf's feet, carrots, and onions around it.

  3. Pour the sauce over the meat and taste for seasoning.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  4. Garlic + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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, which becomes tender through long slow simmering.
Calf's feet
Release gelatin into the gravy, giving it body and a silky texture.
Carrots
Add sweetness and soften during the long cooking.
Glazed onions
Add sweetness and a soft texture to the finished stew.

The step that matters

Remove the scum before adding vegetables. Scum is coagulated protein and fat that rises during boiling. Skimming it early keeps the broth clear and stops off-flavours and greasiness from spreading into the gravy.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, onion, garlic, white wine, pepper, leek):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, onion, garlic, white wine, pepper, leek. 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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