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Soup

Beef Oe Brown Stock

A brown stock made from beef shin, bones, vegetables, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef Oe Brown Stock

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Wipe the beef with a wet cloth.

  2. Remove the meat from the bones and cut it into small pieces, setting aside ½ lb of meat.

  3. Place the remaining meat and bones in a large pot with the cold water and let it sit for 15 to 30 minutes until the water is red.

Simmer the stock

  1. Heat the pot on the stove and bring it slowly to a simmer.

  2. In a hot frying pan, brown the reserved meat with marrow from the bones or drippings.

  3. Add the browned meat to the simmering pot and cook for 5 hours.

  4. Add the vegetables and cook for 1 hour longer.

Finish and cool

  1. Season to taste and allow to cool rapidly.

  2. Remove the fat and clarify the stock as needed.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 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

Shin of beef
Bones and meat release gelatin and flavour into the water during the long simmer.
Reserved browned beef
Browning adds deep, roasted flavour through Maillard reactions before it joins the stock.
Cold water
Slow extraction from cold water draws out collagen and flavour as it heats.
Carrot, onion, celery, turnip
Aromatic vegetables add sweetness and background savoury flavour to the stock.

The step that matters

Brown the reserved meat. Browning in a hot pan creates Maillard reactions that give the stock a deeper, roasted colour and flavour. Pale, steamed meat produces a flatter, greyer stock.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Clovethe original

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