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Beef and Veal Stew

A hearty stew of beef and veal with carrots, turnips, onions, and potatoes, thickened with flour.

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 ↓

Beef and Veal Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the meat

  1. Cut the beef and veal into one-inch pieces.

  2. Cover the meat with cold water and bring to a boil.

  3. Reduce the heat and simmer for 2 to 3 hours until the meat is very tender.

  4. Add salt when the meat is somewhat tender.

Add vegetables and thicken

  1. Wash, peel, and cut the vegetables into cubes and add them to the meat 1 hour before it is done.

  2. Remove the meat and vegetables from the liquid when the vegetables are soft.

  3. Thicken the liquid by mixing 1 tablespoon of flour with an equal amount of cold water until smooth, then add more water to make it pour easily.

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 + 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. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Beef
Long simmering breaks down connective tissue, making the meat tender and rich in flavor.
Veal
Lean, delicate meat that becomes tender during the long simmer and adds body to the stew.
Potatoes
Starch that softens as they cook, thickening the broth slightly and giving the stew body.
Flour
Starch that thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, pourable gravy when mixed with cold water first.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour with cold water. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps, because its starch granules swell unevenly. Blending it smooth with cold water first lets it disperse evenly before thickening.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Okrafits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

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