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French Stew

A stew of roast meat, onion, carrot, turnip, and gravy, served with optional canned peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

French Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat.

  2. Slice the onion and brown it in the butter.

  3. Cut the carrot and turnip into fancy shapes and cook them in water until tender.

Make the stew

  1. Add the leftover gravy from the roast to the skillet, cook for a few minutes, then strain it.

  2. Cut nice slices of the cold roast meat and add them to the gravy; cook for 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Add the cooked carrot and turnip to the skillet.

  4. Optionally add French canned peas.

Serve

  1. Pour the stew onto a platter and serve.

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. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + peastop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,994 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Turnip + peastop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,350 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

Butter
Adds fat and flavour, and helps the onion brown in the pan.
Onion
Browning in butter builds sweet, savoury aroma that flavours the stew.
Carrot
Cooked until tender, it adds soft texture and mild sweetness to the stew.
Turnip
Cooked until tender, it adds soft texture and earthy flavour to the stew.
Gravy from roast meat
Provides moisture and concentrated meat flavour as the base of the stew.
Cold roast meat
Supplies the main protein, which warms through and absorbs flavour from the gravy.

The step that matters

Cook the roast meat gently in the gravy. Meat simmered too hard or too long becomes tough and dry as its proteins tighten. Keeping the gravy at a gentle simmer for the 10 to 15 minutes warms the slices through while keeping them tender.

Swap the peas

The recipe marks peas as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, carrot, turnip, meat):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, carrot, turnip, meat. 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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