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Stewed Hough

A stew of leg of beef cooked slowly with carrots, turnip, onion, and a flour-based gravy.

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

Stewed Hough

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the meat

  1. Place the hough in a slow cooker and brown it well on all sides without burning.

  2. Remove the meat and set it aside on a plate.

Make the gravy

  1. Add the flour to the pan and stir until slightly brown.

  2. Pour in the water, stirring well until it boils.

  3. Season with salt and pepper, then return the meat to the pot.

  4. Cover closely and simmer gently for 30 minutes.

  5. Add the carrots, turnip, and onion, then simmer for 1 hour longer.

  6. Serve the meat garnished with vegetables and pour the gravy over it.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

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

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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

Hough (leg of beef)
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Browned in the pan to thicken the liquid into a gravy.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stew as they soften during simmering.
Turnip
Adds mild earthy flavour and texture as it cooks through in the gravy.
Onion
Adds aroma and savoury depth to the gravy as it simmers.

The step that matters

Browning the meat well without burning. Browning creates deep flavour through the Maillard reaction. Burnt bits taste bitter and can carry into the gravy, so the meat should be coloured evenly over moderate heat.

Swap the onion

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

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

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