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Beef Stew with Vegetables

A hearty stew of beef, potatoes, and parsnips simmered in water and seasoned with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and parsnip work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 353 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Beef Stew with Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Cook

  1. Stew the beef in water for an hour.

  2. Add halved potatoes and split parsnips.

  3. Continue to stew until the vegetables are tender.

  4. Turn the meat several times in the pot.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat and vegetables together.

  2. Skim the gravy and serve it in a separate dish.

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. Potato + parsniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together353 recipes

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

  2. Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Beef + parsniptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together377 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
Provides the main meat; long gentle stewing softens its connective tissue for a tender bite.
Potatoes
Their starch softens during stewing and helps thicken the gravy.
Parsnips
Add a mild sweetness and soften into tender pieces as they cook.

The step that matters

Continue to stew until the vegetables are tender. Stopping early leaves the vegetables firm and the beef chewy, because collagen in the meat breaks down only with prolonged, gentle simmering.

Swap the parsnip

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

  1. Onionfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Parsnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, potato. 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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