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Pot Roast Beef

A slow-cooked beef roast simmered with suet, aromatics, and water, thickened with flour into a savory sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Pot Roast Beef

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Heat the suet with the onion, bay leaves, cloves, and chopped carrot in a kettle for five minutes until very hot.

  2. Season the beef with salt and pepper, then brown it on both sides in the kettle.

Cook and make the sauce

  1. Add the boiling water, cover, and simmer until the beef is very tender.

  2. Add boiling water as needed to maintain the liquid level while the roast cooks.

  3. Remove the beef from the pot and thicken the cooking liquid with the flour.

  4. Strain the sauce and serve it in a sauceboat.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

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

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

Beef
Provides the main protein; slow simmering in moisture makes it tender.
Suet
Adds fat that flavours the pan and helps the beef brown well.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and body to the aromatic base that flavours the sauce.

The step that matters

Keeping the liquid level up while the roast cooks. Adding boiling water as needed keeps the meat partly submerged and moist during long simmering. Letting the liquid boil dry can toughen the surface and scorch the pot, and it leaves too little liquid for the sauce.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, clove, carrot, flour, pepper. 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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