Name: Steamed Roast
Ingredients: 1 roast; salt; pepper; 2 onions

Why it works: Pepper and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Steamed Roast

Ingredients

1 roast
salt
pepper
2 onions

Directions

Prepare

Rub the roast well with salt and pepper.
Place the roast in a double steamer and add the peeled onions on top.

Steam and make gravy

Cover tightly and steam for four hours.
Once done, remove the roast and pour the drippings into a skillet.
If there is too much drippings for gravy, boil it down to the proper amount and thicken.

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.

Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 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

Roast: Forms the main body of the dish and supplies the drippings used for gravy.
Onions: Add aromatic sweetness and flavour to the steam and the drippings.

“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.