Skip to main content
Main

Baked Beef

A slow‑cooked beef dish with bacon, onions, spices, and a bread‑thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,873 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Baked Beef

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Braise the beef

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Place the bacon or lard at the bottom of a pot.

  3. Add the beef and cover it with water.

  4. Add the onions, peppercorns, cloves, bay leaves, carrot, brown bread, coarse sea salt, and vinegar.

  5. Cover the pot and add more hot water if the liquid boils down.

  6. Let the mixture boil for three hours.

Make the gravy

  1. In a separate pan, brown the flour with some butter.

  2. Thin the browned mixture with the gravy from the pot and let it boil once more with the meat.

  3. Transfer the beef to a deep dish and strain the gravy over it.

  4. Adjust the vinegar to taste.

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  4. Beef + carrottop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,606 recipes

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

  5. Beef + meattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,533 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Cross-ribbed beef
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, slow simmering.
Flour
Browned in butter and thins into the gravy, thickening it and adding roasted flavor.
Onions
Release sweetness and aromatic flavor into the cooking liquid as they simmer.
Brown bread
Adds body and helps thicken and flavor the cooking liquid.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the rich broth and gravy.

The step that matters

Brown the flour with butter. Flour must be cooked until golden, not pale or burnt, so the gravy tastes roasted rather than raw or bitter. Thinning it slowly with hot liquid helps prevent lumps.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, meat, onion, carrot, bread, vinegar, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, meat, onion, carrot, bread, vinegar, flour. 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.

More baked beef recipes

Tongue 13Heart 9and Rice Soup 3Casserole 3Soup 3Stew 3 See all 21 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipes