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Stewed Steak

A slow‑cooked beef steak with vegetables in a brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the fat from the steak and set it aside.

  2. Cut the lean steak into 5 or 6 pieces.

  3. Cut the vegetables into dice or julienne strips and keep them in water until needed.

Brown and stew

  1. Heat the butter or fat in a stewpan and fry the steak quickly until browned on both sides.

  2. Remove the steak from the pan.

  3. Add the vegetable trimmings and flour to the pan, frying until brown.

  4. Add the stock or water and stir until boiling.

  5. Return the steak to the pan, season with salt and pepper, cover, and cook gently for about 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Boil the prepared vegetables in salted water until tender.

  2. Arrange the steak on a hot dish, strain the sauce over it, place the browned fat on top, and garnish with the boiled vegetables.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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 steak
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, gentle stewing.
Flour
Browned with the fat, it thickens the stock into a sauce.
Butter or good fat
Browns the steak and carries flavour into the sauce.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aroma as the stew cooks.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and colour to the stew and garnish.

The step that matters

Frying the flour until brown. Browning the flour in the fat builds nutty flavour and colour for the sauce, and it must be stirred to avoid scorching. Cooking it long enough also removes the raw taste of the flour before the stock is added.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, flour, carrot, turnip, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Okrafits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, flour, carrot, turnip, 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.

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