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Stewed Shin of Beef, with Dumplings

A slow‑cooked beef shin stew with carrots, turnips, onions, and dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Stewed Shin of Beef, with Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash, peel, and slice the carrots and turnips.

  2. Boil the sliced carrots and turnips in 1 quart of water for 20 minutes.

Make the stew

  1. Fry the beef in 2 oz of dripping until lightly browned.

  2. Remove the beef and place it in a saucepan.

  3. Fry the sliced onions in the remaining dripping.

  4. Stir in 2 tablespoons of flour until browned.

  5. Add the boiled vegetables to the beef.

  6. Pour the vegetable water into the frying pan to deglaze.

  7. Add the deglazed liquid to the beef and vegetables.

  8. Season with pepper and salt.

  9. Stew slowly for 1.5 hours.

Make the dumplings and serve

  1. For the dumplings, mix the remaining flour with baking powder and water to form a dough.

  2. Boil the dumpling dough separately for 20-30 minutes before serving.

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. 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

Flour
Browns with the fat and thickens the stewing liquid into a rich gravy.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dumpling dough so the dumplings rise and turn light.
Dripping
Carries the browning of the beef and onions and adds richness to the stew.
Beef shin
Slow stewing breaks down its connective tissue, making the meat tender and moist.

The step that matters

Browning the beef. Searing the beef until lightly browned builds deep savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale meat yields a weaker, greyer stew, so the surface should be well coloured before adding liquid.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

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