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Meat Stretchers

A slow‑cooked brisket stew with curry, celery, onion, and flour, served over boiled rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,518 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Meat Stretchers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and sear

  1. Wipe the brisket with wet cheesecloth and cut it into thin slices or cubes.

  2. Sear the meat in a hot skillet, adding a piece of suet if the meat is very dry to prevent sticking.

  3. Sear on all sides, then place in a pot and cover with boiling water.

  4. Transfer to a cooker and let cook overnight.

Cook and thicken

  1. In the skillet where the meat was seared, fry the onion until light brown.

  2. Add the fried onion to the meat, along with the salt, and boil slowly until the meat is tender.

  3. Mix the flour and curry powder with a little cold water and boil for 3 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled rice.

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 + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Celery + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Brisket
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow cooking.
Onion
Fried until light brown, it adds sweetness and savory depth to the dish.
Flour
Boiled with liquid, it thickens the cooking liquid into a light gravy.
Curry powder
Adds aroma and warm spice flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Searing the meat on all sides. Browning creates flavorful compounds through the Maillard reaction. Meat that is crowded or wet steams instead of browning, so it loses that depth of flavor.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, 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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