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Hodge Podge

A beef stew with onions, carrots, turnips, celery, and spices, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Hodge Podge

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil the slices of coarse beef in 3 quarts of water and 1 quart of small beer.

  2. Skim the broth well, then add onions, carrots, turnips, celery, pepper, and salt.

  3. Once the meat is tender, remove it and strain the soup.

Thicken and finish

  1. In a saucepan, melt a little butter and add flour, stirring well to prevent burning.

  2. Remove the fat from the broth, return it to the stewpan, and stew the beef in it until tender.

  3. Serve the soup with turnips, carrots, spinach, or celery.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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

Coarse beef
Provides the meat that becomes tender through long simmering, adding savoury flavour to the broth.
Flour
Cooked with butter into a roux, it thickens the broth and gives it body.
Butter
Carries fat for the roux, helping the flour cook smoothly and add richness.
Small beer
Adds a light malty, slightly acidic flavour to the broth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and butter. Flour cooked in melted butter can scorch on the bottom of the pan if not stirred constantly, giving a burnt taste. Stirring keeps the roux smooth and evenly cooked before it is added to the broth.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beer, beef, onion, carrot, celery, pepper, 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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