Skip to main content
Main

Steak a LA Jardiniere

Steak à la Jardinière is a dish of steak pieces cooked with peas, French beans, carrot, turnip, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 a LA Jardiniere

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the steak into neat pieces and fry quickly in the butter.

  2. Remove the steak and add the flour to the pan, stirring until smooth.

  3. Pour in the gravy and stir until it boils.

  4. Return the steak to the pan and simmer gently for three hours.

  5. Cut the carrot and turnip into thin strips and add them to the pan.

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. Beans + turniptop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Peas + beanstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together949 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  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

Steak
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender during long gentle simmering.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
Butter
Fats the pan for frying the steak and adds richness to the dish.
Gravy
Forms the cooking liquid that moistens the steak and vegetables.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and colour as it softens in the simmering liquid.
Turnip
Adds body and a mild sweetness as it softens in the simmering liquid.

The step that matters

Simmering the steak gently. Holding the liquid at a gentle simmer for three hours lets the connective tissue in the steak break down slowly, making it tender. A hard boil toughens the meat and can break up the thickened gravy.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

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

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipes