Skip to main content
Main

Pot Roast

A slow‑cooked beef roast flavored with bacon, bread crumbs, chili, celery, onions, carrots, and potatoes, finished with a brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Pot Roast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Ask the butcher for a cut of beef from the round.

  2. Lard the beef with small pieces of breakfast bacon.

  3. Remove marrow from the bone.

  4. Mix the marrow with bread crumbs, chili teaspoons, chopped celery, salt, and beaten egg.

  5. Lay the beef flat with the bacon side up.

  6. Spread the dressing over the beef.

  7. Roll the beef up.

  8. Tie the rolled beef securely.

Brown and simmer

  1. Heat an iron kettle.

  2. Fry the salt pork in the hot fat until browned.

  3. Remove the browned salt pork from the kettle.

  4. Brown the rolled beef in the hot fat until seared all over.

  5. Place the beef in the kettle.

  6. Add bacon slices to the kettle.

  7. Add peppercorns to the kettle.

  8. Add onion to the kettle.

  9. Simmer slowly for 4 hours.

  10. Add sliced carrots and chopped potatoes 2 hours before the end of simmering.

Finish with gravy

  1. Remove the beef from the kettle.

  2. Make a brown gravy by mixing flour with water and cooking it in the remaining liquid.

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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  3. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

  5. Pork + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long slow simmering.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and bind the marrow and egg into a stuffing-like dressing.
Egg
Binds the bread crumb dressing so it holds together inside the roll.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory flavor to the hot kettle for browning.
Potatoes
Absorb cooking liquid and add starch and body to the pot.

The step that matters

Browning the rolled beef until seared all over. Searing creates browned surface flavor through the Maillard reaction. Drying and browning the exterior before simmering builds color and savory depth that the long moist cooking cannot add later.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, bread, egg, pork, onion, carrot, potato):

  1. Parsleyfits about as well
  2. Garlicfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, bread, egg, pork, onion, carrot, potato. 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.

More pot roast recipes

Beef 9Beef 5Mutton 4Veal 4Chicken 3Veal 3 See all 137 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipes