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Meat Stew with Dumplings

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Meat Stew with Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown the meat

  1. Cut the meat into small pieces, removing the fat.

  2. Render the fat and brown the meat in it.

  3. Cover the browned meat with boiling water and boil for 5 minutes.

Simmer and finish

  1. Reduce heat and cook until the meat is tender, about 3 hours on the stove or 5 hours in a fireless cooker.

  2. Add carrots, turnips, onions, salt, and pepper during the last hour of cooking.

  3. Add potatoes 15 minutes before serving.

  4. Thicken the stew with flour diluted in cold water.

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. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Cheaper cut of beef
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender with long, slow cooking.
Flour
Thickens the stew's cooking liquid as it heats, giving it body.
Potatoes
Add starch that softens during cooking and helps thicken and bulk up the stew.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and firm texture that holds up during simmering.
Turnips
Add a mildly sharp, earthy flavor and firm texture after simmering.

The step that matters

Reduce heat and cook until the meat is tender. Collagen in cheaper cuts of beef only breaks down into gelatin with long, gentle simmering. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and leave it chewy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, potato, flour, pepper, turnip, carrot):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, potato, flour, pepper, turnip, carrot. 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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