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Brown Stew

A beef stew simmered slowly in water with onions and rendered fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 32,460 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Brown Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dredge the steak pieces in flour and trim off all the fat.

  2. Render the fat from the steak in a saucepan until melted.

Brown and stew

  1. Add sliced onion to the fat and cook until brown.

  2. Add the meat to the saucepan and brown it lightly.

  3. Pour in enough boiling water to cover the meat.

  4. Simmer slowly for 3 hours, ensuring it does not boil.

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. Flour + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 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

Round steak
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow simmering.
Flour
Coats the meat so it browns richly and helps thicken the cooking liquid.
Onion
Browns in the rendered fat, adding sweetness and savory depth to the stew.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly without boiling. A gentle simmer lets tough connective tissue in the steak break down slowly. A rolling boil toughens the muscle fibers and can make the meat dry and stringy.

“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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