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Spanish Stew

A hearty stew of browned meat, tomatoes, peppers, and optional onion simmered slowly in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Spanish Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Dredge the meat heavily with flour and fry in a frying pan until very brown.

  2. If using onion, slice it and add to the meat while frying.

Cook the stew

  1. Transfer the meat to a kettle, add salt and a small amount of water, and cook slowly for 1 hour.

  2. Add the tomatoes and peppers, and continue cooking slowly for 1.5 hours.

  3. Add more water if necessary, using broth for gravy and adding thickening if desired.

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. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Meat + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Meat + tomatotop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,438 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Boiling meat
Provides the main body of the stew and, after slow cooking, becomes tender.
Flour
Coats the meat so it browns deeply and later helps thicken the gravy.
Canned tomatoes
Add acidity and liquid that form the base of the sauce.
Spanish peppers
Add flavour and body to the sauce as they cook slowly with the tomatoes.

The step that matters

Browning the floured meat. Frying the flour-coated meat until very brown builds deep roasted flavour through the Maillard reaction and helps the flour form a crust. Pale meat gives a flat, less savoury stew.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, tomato, pepper, flour):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Eggplantfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, tomato, pepper, flour. 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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