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Brown Meat Stew

A stew of stewing beef, onions, carrots, turnip, and gravy made with flour and dripping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Brown Meat Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pan

  1. Melt the dripping in a pan over gentle heat.

  2. Add the sliced onion, cover the pan, and let it brown.

Cook the stew

  1. Wash and dry the beef, then cut it into 3-inch squares.

  2. Add the beef to the pan with the onions, stir, cover, and cook slowly for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.

  3. Blend the flour with the water, add to the pan, and stir until boiling.

  4. Add the prepared carrot, turnip, and seasoning, and continue cooking gently for another hour.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat and vegetables, pouring the gravy over them.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Stewing beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow, covered cooking.
Flour
Blended with water, it thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy.
Onion
Browned in the dripping, it adds sweetness and savoury depth to the gravy.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and firm texture after the long simmer.
Turnip
Adds a mild sweetness and soft texture to the stew.

The step that matters

Browning the onion and beef. Browning the onion in the fat builds deeper flavour through caramelisation and Maillard browning. Pale, steamed onions give a flatter, less savoury gravy.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, 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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