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Steak Stewed

A stew of steak pieces with carrot, turnip, onion, celery, butter, flour, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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. Cut the steak into ¾ inch thick pieces.

  2. Heat the butter in a small pan until hot.

  3. Slice the onion into rings and fry in the butter until very brown.

Brown the vegetables and steak

  1. Scrape and chop the carrot, then fry it until brown.

  2. Remove the vegetables and fry the steak on both sides until crisp.

  3. If there's excess butter, pour it out.

Stew

  1. Return the vegetables to the pan and place the steak on top.

  2. Chop the turnip into small pieces and add it to the pan.

  3. Add a leaf of celery 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. Turnip + oniontop 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. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + flourtop 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

Steak
Provides the main meat, browning on the surface for savoury flavour and a firmer texture.
Onion
Browns deeply in butter, and its sugars caramelize into sweetness and savoury depth.
Carrot
Its natural sugars brown and soften, adding sweetness and body to the dish.
Butter
Conducts heat for frying and browns the surfaces, adding rich flavour.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and body as it cooks down in the pan.

The step that matters

Frying the steak until crisp. The steak needs a hot pan and enough room so its surface browns rather than steams. Crowding the pan or leaving the meat too wet lowers the temperature, so the crust forms slowly and the flavour stays flat.

Swap the onion

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

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

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