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Stew

A simple stew of onion, carrot, and turnip simmered with salt pork or butter, flour, and optional curry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Stew

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Stew

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the onion, carrot, and turnip in the salt pork or butter until richly browned.

  2. Add the flour and cook for a minute.

  3. Stir in the salt and boiling water with dissolved beef extract. Cook for a few minutes and strain.

  4. For a curry sauce, add curry powder.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the liquid into a sauce as it cooks with the fat and juices.
Salt pork or butter
Fat that carries the browning of the vegetables and adds richness.
Beef extract
Adds concentrated savoury, meaty flavour to the boiling water.
Onion
Browns to add sweetness and savoury depth to the base.
Carrot
Browns to add sweetness and body to the base.

The step that matters

Browning the vegetables in the fat. Deep browning through the Maillard reaction builds the flavour of the sauce. Pale vegetables give a flat, weak taste, so cook until richly browned without burning.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Cuminfits less well

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