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Beef Stew

A hearty stew of beef, onions, turnip, carrot, and potatoes simmered in water, optionally with tomato.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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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 ↓

Beef Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Wipe the meat, cut it into small pieces, and remove all fine crumbly bones.

  2. Put the larger bones and tough meat into a kettle and cover with cold water.

  3. Melt fat in a frying pan, dredge the tender meat with salt, pepper, and flour, and brown it in the hot fat.

  4. Brown the sliced onions, then add the meat and onions to the kettle.

  5. Add boiling water to cover and simmer for 2 to 3 hours, or until the meat is tender.

Finish the stew

  1. Half an hour before serving, remove the fat and bones, and add the turnip, carrot, and parboiled potatoes.

  2. To parboil, peel the potatoes, cut them into quarters, and cook for 5 minutes before adding to the stew.

  3. Cook for an additional 20 minutes.

  4. When ready to serve, skim out the meat and potatoes, place them on a dish, and thicken the gravy if needed.

  5. Add more seasoning and the strained tomato if desired, then pour the gravy over the meat.

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 + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Potato + tomatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,798 recipes

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

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow simmering.
Flour
Dredging the meat helps it brown and thickens the gravy.
Potatoes
Starchy vegetable that softens in the stew and adds body to the dish.
Strained tomato
Adds acidity and color to the gravy when used.

The step that matters

Simmer until the meat is tender. Tough cuts need long, gentle simmering so their connective tissue breaks down. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and make the gravy cloudy.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, turnip, carrot, potato, 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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