Skip to main content
Main

Another Way to Stew a Round of Beef

A slow‑cooked beef stew with onions, wine, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Eliza Leslie · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and 16,901 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-nonanone, which smells fruity, floral. The science ↓

Another Way to Stew a Round of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Take a round of fresh beef (or half of one if it is very large) and remove the bone.

  2. The day before you cook it, lay it in a pickle made of equal proportions of water and vinegar with salt to your taste.

  3. If you like it stuffed, have ready when you take the meat out of the pickle a force‑meat of grated bread crumbs, sweet herbs, butter, spice, pepper and salt, and minced parsley mixed with beaten yolk of egg.

  4. Fill the opening from whence you took the bone with this stuffing and bind a tape firmly round the meat.

Stew

  1. The next morning take it out of the pickle, put it into a large pot or stew‑pan, and just cover it with water.

  2. Add two or three large onions, a few cloves, a little whole black pepper, and a large glass of port or claret.

  3. If it is a whole round of beef, add two glasses of wine.

  4. Stew it slowly for at least four hours or more, in proportion to its size, until it is thoroughly done and tender all through.

Brown and make the gravy

  1. An hour before serving, take the meat out of the pot and pour the gravy into a pan.

  2. Put a large lump of butter into the pot, dredge the beef with flour, and return it to the pot to brown, turning it often to prevent burning.

  3. Alternatively, put it into a Dutch oven.

  4. Cover the lid with hot coals, renewing them as they go out.

  5. Take the gravy that you poured from the meat and skim off all the fat.

  6. Put the gravy into a sauce‑pan, mix with a little butter rolled in flour, and add some more cloves and wine.

  7. Bring the gravy to a boil.

  8. If it is not well browned, burn some sugar on a hot spoon and stir it in.

By Eliza Leslie. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

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. See the original page.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  2. Wine + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together2,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-isoeugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. Onion + winetop 20% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together7,784 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 (in the method)
Slow stewing turns the tough muscle tender and gives the meat its main body.
Onions
Their sugars and aromatics add sweetness and savoury depth to the stewing liquid and gravy.
Wine
Adds acidity and flavour to the stewing liquid and the finished gravy.
Flour (in the method)
Dredging and thickening with butter give the browned meat a crust and the gravy body.

The step that matters

Stewing slowly until tender. Collagen in tough beef breaks down into gelatin only with long, low, moist heat. Rushing or boiling hard leaves the meat stringy and dry, so it must simmer until fork-tender all the way through.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wine, clove):

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Tomatobetter flavor fit
  3. Carrotbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, clove. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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 beef stew recipes

with Dumplings 30Brazilian 20French 20Spiced 17Pudding 16English 15 See all 357 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes