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Stewed Brisket of Beef

A slow-cooked stew of beef brisket with vegetables and a tomato-based sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Stewed Brisket of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Place the brisket with hard fat in a stewpot with ½ cup of water.

  2. Bring to a boil and skim thoroughly.

  3. Add carrots, turnips, onions, celery, and peppercorns.

  4. Stew until extremely tender.

  5. Remove all flat bones and fat from the soup.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, mix ½ pint of soup with catsup, mustard, flour, butter, and salt.

  2. Boil the sauce for a few minutes and pour it around the meat.

  3. Serve the meat in a tureen with the soup or separately with vegetables.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Brisket of beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes very tender through long, slow stewing.
Hard fat
Melts slowly into the broth, adding richness and moisture to the meat.
Flour
Thickens the soup into a smooth sauce when boiled.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce, giving it a smoother mouthfeel.
Catsup
Adds sweetness and acidity to the sauce.
Made mustard
Adds sharpness that balances the richness of the meat and sauce.

The step that matters

Stew until extremely tender. Brisket is a tough cut rich in connective tissue. Long, gentle simmering below a hard boil slowly converts collagen into gelatin, so the meat becomes tender. Rushing or boiling hard toughens the fibres and leaves the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, onion, celery, flour, butter. 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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