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Beef Stew

A slow-cooked beef stew with onions, carrots, turnip, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dredge the beef pieces in flour, then season with salt and pepper.

  2. In a large pot, combine the beef, onion, carrot, and turnip.

  3. Add Worcestershire sauce and tomato ketchup.

  4. Cover the ingredients with boiling water.

Cook

  1. Cook for 5 hours over low heat.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

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

  5. Onion + carrottop 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

Beef shin
Becomes tender and rich during long, slow cooking as its connective tissue breaks down.
Flour
Dredging the beef helps thicken the cooking liquid and lightly brown the meat surface.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aroma as it softens into the broth.
Tomato ketchup
Adds acidity and sweetness that give the stew a deeper, rounded flavor.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savory, tangy depth that enriches the overall flavor of the broth.

The step that matters

Cook for 5 hours over low heat. Shin is full of connective tissue that needs long, gentle heat to turn into gelatin. Rushing with high heat toughens the meat and can make the liquid boil hard, leaving the beef chewy.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, flour, onion, carrot, turnip, sauce. 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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