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Beef and Bean Stew

A hearty stew of beef, kidney beans, onions, tomatoes, and salt pork simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Beef and Bean Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the beans and soak them overnight.

  2. Cut the salt pork into small pieces and render the fat in a pot.

  3. Cut the beef into small pieces and brown it in the pork fat.

Simmer

  1. Add the chopped onion and tomatoes, then add enough water to cover the ingredients.

  2. Cook just below boiling for about three hours.

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  3. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 recipes

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

  4. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  5. Onion + porktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 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
Provides the meaty base, and browning it in fat builds deep savoury flavour.
Red kidney beans
Add body and texture, and their starch helps thicken the stew as they cook.
Salt pork
Its rendered fat carries heat for browning the beef and adds rich, savoury flavour.
Onion
Softens and turns sweet as it cooks, adding aroma to the base of the stew.
Tomatoes
Add moisture and gentle acidity that brightens the long-cooked stew.

The step that matters

Cook just below boiling for about three hours. A gentle simmer lets the beef's connective tissue break down slowly so it turns tender. A rolling boil toughens the meat and can break the beans apart.

Swap the kidney beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, tomato, pork):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Sesamefits better
  3. Peanutfits better
  4. Kidney beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, tomato, pork. 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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