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Beef a LA Venison

A braised beef dish cooked with vinegar, bacon, onions, carrot, lemon peel, bay leaf, peppercorns, sugar, cloves, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,873 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Beef a LA Venison

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the beef

  1. Rub the beef lightly with coarse sea salt and soak in vinegar for 3 to 4 days.

  2. Remove the beef, drain slightly, and sew thin threads of bacon through the meat.

Braise

  1. In a kettle, heat butter and brown the meat lightly.

  2. Add some of the vinegar and the seasoning ingredients, then boil for 15 minutes.

  3. Dissolve flour in cold water and add to the meat, then boil again briefly.

  4. Cover the kettle tightly and cook in a 300°F (150°C) oven for 2 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 + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Beef
Lean meat that becomes tender during long, slow, moist cooking with vinegar.
Fat bacon
Threaded through the meat to add moisture and rich flavour as it cooks.
Onions
Soften and sweeten in the cooking liquid, adding body to the sauce.
Flour
Dissolved in water and added to thicken the cooking liquid into a sauce.
Vinegar
Acidity that helps tenderise the meat during the long soak and braise.

The step that matters

Browning the meat in butter. Searing the surface creates browned, savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Meat that is crowded or wet will steam instead, so it needs dry pieces and enough space in the pan.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, vinegar, onion, carrot, sugar, clove, butter):

  1. Cherryfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, vinegar, onion, carrot, sugar, clove, butter. 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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