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Old-fashioned Pot Roast

A beef pot roast simmered with onions, tomatoes, carrots, celery, and bacon, served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Old-fashioned Pot Roast

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Marinate

  1. In a deep bowl, combine sliced onions, salad oil, salt, pepper, garlic, and vinegar.

  2. Add the beef and let it marinate for 8 hours.

Brown and cook

  1. Preheat an old-fashioned iron pot until intensely hot.

  2. Place bacon slices in the bottom.

  3. Remove the beef from the marinate and brown it thoroughly on one side, then turn and brown the other side.

  4. After browning, add the tomatoes, carrots, remaining marinate, parsley, and celery to the pot.

  5. Once cooked, remove the meat and mash the vegetables and gravy together.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat garnished with fried onions and the gravy on the side.

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. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Beef
Forms the main body of the dish; long cooking in liquid makes it tender.
Vinegar
Acidity in the marinade helps tenderize the meat's surface.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body to the braising liquid that becomes the gravy.
Bacon
Its fat renders into the pot, adding richness and browning for the sauce.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the vegetables that are mashed into the gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the beef thoroughly. Deep browning builds caramelized, savory flavor through the Maillard reaction. Pale or uneven searing leaves the gravy flat, so the meat should be dry and the pot very hot before it goes in.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, pepper, garlic, vinegar, tomato, carrot):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, pepper, garlic, vinegar, tomato, carrot. 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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