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Beef Ragout

A hearty beef stew with carrots, onions, celery, and a sauce thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Beef Ragout

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut the meat from the bone.

  2. Dust the meat with flour.

  3. Fry the beef until browned.

Stew

  1. Pour boiling water and small beer over the beef.

  2. Add carrots, onion with cloves, whole pepper, salt, lemon peel, and sweet herbs.

  3. Let it stew for 1 hour.

  4. Add good gravy.

  5. Remove the meat when tender.

  6. Strain the sauce.

Finish the sauce

  1. Thicken the sauce with flour.

  2. Add boiled celery.

  3. Add a little ketchup.

  4. Return the meat to the sauce and simmer.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Rump of beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow stewing.
Flour
Dusting helps the meat brown, and flour thickens the sauce.
Small beer
Adds liquid and a malty flavour to the stewing sauce.
Carrots
Add gentle sweetness and body to the sauce as they cook.
Ketchup
Adds tomato-based acidity and sweetness to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the beef until browned.. Browning triggers Maillard reactions between meat proteins and sugars, creating deep savoury flavour that carries into the sauce. Pale meat gives a flatter, less rich result.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Cherryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, beer, carrot, onion, clove, 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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