Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Steak

A stew of beef steak with onions, turnips, carrots, and a ketchup-based sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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 ↓

Stewed Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Cut the steak into neat pieces.

  2. Fry the steak pieces in clarified dripping for 2–3 minutes on each side until browned.

  3. Slice the onions, turnips, and carrots.

  4. Fry the sliced vegetables in the same pan after the meat.

Stew

  1. Transfer the meat and vegetables to a stew pan with a tightly fitting lid.

  2. Add the water or stock and simmer gently for 2 hours.

  3. Remove the meat to a hot dish and cover.

  4. If the liquid is greasy, skim it.

  5. Add pepper, salt, and ketchup.

  6. Thicken the sauce.

  7. Pour the thickened sauce boiling over the steak before serving hot.

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. Turnip + carrottop 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. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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 steak
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long gentle simmering.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, adding depth to the sauce.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the stewing liquid.
Turnips
Hold their shape during stewing and add mild earthy flavor to the sauce.
Thickening agent
Thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce that clings to the meat.

The step that matters

Simmering gently for 2 hours. A gentle simmer breaks down the connective tissue in the steak slowly, leaving it tender. A rolling boil toughens meat fibres and can make the sauce cloudy and greasy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, turnip, carrot, ketchup, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, turnip, carrot, ketchup, pepper. 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.

More stewed steak recipes

with Oysters 11and Macaroni 3 See all 40 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes