Skip to main content
Main

Beef, Minced, Savoury

A savory minced beef gravy with shallots, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, walnuts, stock, flour, store sauce, mustard, and served with potatoes or toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Beef, Minced, Savoury

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gravy

  1. Fry the shallots in a little fat until soft.

  2. Stir in the stock with the browned flour and store sauce, and bring to a boil.

  3. Add the chopped walnuts, a little of their vinegar, salt, pepper, and mustard.

Add the beef and serve

  1. Cut the beef into small dice and add it to the gravy, letting it simmer for 20 minutes.

  2. Bring the mixture just to boiling before serving.

  3. Serve with a border of potatoes or other vegetables, or with toast or croutons.

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. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main body of meat, which becomes tender as it simmers in the gravy.
Browned flour
Thickens the stock into a gravy and adds a toasted, nutty flavour.
Shallots
Build a mild, sweet savoury base when softened in fat before the liquid is added.
Pickled walnut
Adds a sharp, tangy acidity from its vinegar that cuts through the rich meat.
Stock
Supplies the liquid that forms the gravy and carries the other flavours.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture just to boiling before serving. Once the flour has thickened the stock, boiling hard can break the texture and toughen the beef. Heating only until it just reaches a boil keeps the gravy smooth and the meat tender.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, shallot, parsley, thyme, flour, sauce, pepper):

  1. Black-eyed peafits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, shallot, parsley, thyme, flour, sauce, 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes