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Italian Rump Steaks

A stew of rump steak with onions, carrots, turnip, and a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Italian Rump Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Lightly brown the steak in a frying pan.

  2. Rub the butter with flour until it forms a paste.

  3. Tie the onion with cloves in muslin and set aside.

  4. Brown the carrots and turnip in the frying pan.

  5. Mix the warm water with the butter and flour mixture.

Braise

  1. Place the steak and vegetables in a stew pan and pour the liquid over them.

  2. Simmer slowly for 2 to 3 hours.

  3. For the gravy, brown the steak for a few minutes in butter.

  4. Add the boiling water from the button onions to the steak.

  5. Cover the steak with liquid, add peppercorns and salt, and simmer gently for 1.5 hours.

  6. Strain the gravy and place the steak on a dish.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. For thickening, mix butter and flour in a pan with pepper, salt, ketchup, and wine.

  2. Gradually add the gravy and simmer for 15 minutes until smooth.

  3. Warm the onions in the gravy and pour over the steak.

  4. Garnish with horseradish.

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. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + turniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  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

Rump steak
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow simmering.
Butter and flour
Form a roux that thickens the gravy into a smooth, glossy sauce.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the braising liquid as they soften.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and earthy flavour to the braising liquid.
Onion
Flavours the braising liquid with aroma as it cooks in muslin.

The step that matters

Simmering the steak slowly. Rump is a tough cut with connective tissue that needs long, gentle simmering to break down and become tender. Boiling hard toughens the meat and makes the gravy cloudy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, clove, carrot, turnip, ketchup, port wine):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, clove, carrot, turnip, ketchup, port wine. 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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