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Pine Street Stew

A hearty beef stew with carrots, onion, pepper, salt, and a flour‑thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Pine Street Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Brown the beef on all sides in a pot.

  2. Place a muffin ring under the beef to prevent sticking.

  3. Add the sliced carrots and onion.

  4. Cover and stew slowly for 1 hour until the carrots are tender.

  5. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Serve

  1. Serve on a platter with the vegetables over the beef.

  2. If more gravy is needed, add a little water and thicken with flour.

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

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

  2. Carrot + oniontop 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. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

  5. Beef + carrottop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,606 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, which becomes tender during slow stewing.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stew as they soften during cooking.
Onion
Adds savory depth and aroma as it softens into the cooking liquid.
Flour
Thickens the gravy by binding with liquid as it heats.

The step that matters

Browning the beef on all sides. Browning creates deep flavor through the Maillard reaction. Meat that is crowded or wet will steam instead of browning, leaving the stew flatter in taste.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, pepper, 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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