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Spanish Stew

A stew of salt pork, sweet potato, yuca root, sweet peppers, and plantains thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and flour work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 627 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Spanish Stew

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the salt pork in water.

  2. Add sweet potato, yuca root, sweet peppers, ripe plantains, and green plantains.

  3. Let all ingredients stew until cooked through.

  4. Thicken the stew with a mixture of flour and water.

  5. Season to taste with sugar.

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. Sweet potato + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together627 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sweet potato + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

  5. Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Salt pork
Provides fat and savory flavor that seasons the stew as it cooks.
Plantains
Starchy vegetables that soften while stewing and thicken the broth slightly.
Yuca root
Starchy root that becomes tender and adds body to the stew.
Sweet potato
Starchy vegetable that softens and adds mild sweetness to the stew.
Flour
Starch that thickens the cooking liquid into a thicker stew.

The step that matters

Thicken the stew with flour and water. Flour must be mixed smoothly with cold water before adding, otherwise it clumps. Starch thickens the liquid as it heats, so the stew should simmer briefly after adding it.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper, flour, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, flour, sugar. 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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