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Steak, Stewed

A beef steak stew cooked with onion, carrot, turnip, butter, flour, and stock, seasoned with pepper and salt.

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 ↓

Steak, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. Cut the steak into 5 or 6 pieces.

  3. Dice or julienne the onion, carrot, and turnip, and keep the diced vegetables in water.

Brown and stew

  1. Heat the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Fry the steak quickly until browned on both sides, then remove the steak from the pan.

  3. Add the vegetable trimmings and flour to the pan and fry the mixture until brown.

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

  5. Return the steak to the pan, season with pepper and salt, and simmer until cooked through.

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. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Beefsteak
Provides the meat that becomes tender during slow simmering.
Flour
Browns in the fat and thickens the stock into a gravy.
Butter
Carries the heat for browning and adds rich flavour to the gravy.
Stock or water
Liquid that simmers the steak and dissolves the browned flavour into the sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the steak quickly until browned on both sides. Searing over high heat browns the surface through the Maillard reaction, building flavour that carries into the gravy. Crowding the pan or leaving it too long makes the meat steam and go grey instead.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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