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Stewed Beef Steak

A thick beef steak is browned and stewed with vegetables, herbs, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 Beef Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the steak

  1. In a large saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Brown the steak on both sides, moving it often to prevent burning.

  3. Sprinkle the flour over the steak and cook until it is colored.

  4. Gradually add enough broth or water to cover the meat.

Stew

  1. Once boiling, season with salt and remove any scum.

  2. Add the sliced onion, carrots, turnip, and sweet herbs.

  3. Stew the steak gently for 2.5 to 3 hours.

  4. About 15 minutes before serving, mix the rice flour with cayenne and stir into the gravy.

  5. Add the mushroom ketchup and optional curry powder for flavor.

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

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

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

Beef steak
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, gentle stewing.
Flour
Browns with the butter and steak, then thickens the broth into a gravy.
Butter
Carries the browning of the steak and adds richness to the gravy.
Rice flour
Added late to thicken the gravy without making it cloudy or heavy.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savory, umami depth to the gravy.

The step that matters

Browning the steak and flour. Browning the steak in butter and cooking the flour until colored builds deep savory flavor through the Maillard reaction. Pale, under-browned meat gives a flat, grey-tasting gravy.

Swap the onion

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

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

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