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An Excellent Hashed Beef or Mutton

A savory hash of sliced beef or mutton simmered with onion, herbs, and sauces, finished with tarragon vinegar and served with croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

An Excellent Hashed Beef or Mutton

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove skin and outer edges from the meat and cut it into neat slices.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, combine the meat gravy, water, mushroom ketchup, Harvey Sauce, minced herbs, chopped onion, salt, and cayenne; bring to a boil for 15 minutes.

  2. Mix a little of the liquid with the flour, then stir it into the stewpan and boil for another 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture through a sieve back into the pan, add the meat slices, and keep warm without boiling.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, stir in the tarragon vinegar and arrange croutons around a hot dish.

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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

  4. Onion + tarragontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,568 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Flour + tarragontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together788 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

Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth gravy as it boils.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds deep savoury, umami flavour to the gravy.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds a bright acidity that lifts the rich gravy when stirred in at the end.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and body to the simmered liquid.

The step that matters

Keep the meat warm without boiling. Boiling toughens meat proteins and makes them dry and stringy, so the slices should be held just below a simmer once added.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, mushroom, ketchup, sauce, flour, tarragon, vinegar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, mushroom, ketchup, sauce, flour, tarragon, vinegar. 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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