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Beef with Parsley

Beef with parsley is a slow‑cooked beef dish garnished with pickled pork and served with a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Beef with Parsley

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cook the beef

  1. Place the beef in a pot and cover it with water.

  2. Boil slowly for about 4 hours.

  3. Remove the beef, dredge it with flour, and place it in an oven at 400°F (200°C) to brown.

Make the gravy

  1. In a separate bowl, stir 1 teaspoon of white flour and 1 teaspoon of brown flour into 1½ cups of the beef broth until it thickens.

Serve

  1. Garnish the beef with thin slices of pickled pork, pour some gravy over it, and serve the rest in a dish.

  2. Serve very hot.

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Beef + parsleytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,866 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + porktop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,804 recipes

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

  5. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Forms the main body of the dish and yields the broth used for the gravy.
Flour
Dredged onto the beef to help it brown, and thickens the broth into gravy.
Beef broth
Liquid base of the gravy, carrying flavour and thickened by the flour.
Pickled pork
Adds salty, tangy flavour as a garnish for the beef.

The step that matters

Browning the floured beef in the oven. Flour on the surface browns through dry heat, creating color and flavour. If the beef is not dried or the oven is too cool, it will steam and stay pale.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, flour. 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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