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Beef a LA Mode

A slow‑cooked beef stew with salt pork, onions, carrots, celery, herbs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef a LA Mode

Ingredients

Directions

Sear the beef

  1. Melt the salt pork in a pot until hot, then set aside.

  2. Add the beef to the pot and sear for 10 minutes on one side.

  3. Turn the beef and sear for another 10 minutes.

  4. In a separate frying pan, fry the onions in butter until soft.

  5. Place the onions on top of the seared beef.

Make the sauce

  1. In the frying pan, combine 2 tablespoons of butter and 2 tablespoons of flour, stirring until brown.

  2. Gradually add boiling water to the flour mixture until blended.

  3. Pour the mixture over the beef, then add enough boiling water to half cover the beef.

Braise

  1. Bring to a boil, then add carrots, celery, parsley, cloves, allspice, pepper, bay leaf, garlic, and vinegar.

  2. Cover the pot tightly to retain steam, wrapping a cloth around the lid if necessary.

  3. Reduce heat to a gentle simmer and cook slowly for 6 hours.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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
Slow simmering in liquid breaks down its connective tissue, making it tender.
Flour
Browned in butter and blended into the liquid, it thickens the sauce.
Butter
Carries the flavour of the onions and toasts with the flour for a nutty base.
Onions
Softened and laid over the beef, they sweeten and enrich the braising liquid.
Salt pork
Its rendered fat adds savoury richness for searing the beef.
Vinegar
A small amount of acidity brightens the rich, long-cooked sauce.

The step that matters

Keep the braise at a gentle simmer with the lid tightly covered. A hard boil toughens meat and evaporates the liquid, while a gentle simmer with steam kept in lets collagen slowly convert to gelatin, so the beef stays moist and tender over the long cook.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, beef, butter, flour, carrot, celery, parsley):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, beef, butter, flour, carrot, celery, parsley. 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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