Skip to main content
Main

Beef Gobbets

A beef stew simmered with carrots, turnips, celery, herbs, bread crust, rice, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Beef Gobbets

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Place the beef in a stewpan and cover with water.

  2. Simmer gently for 1 hour.

  3. Add the carrots, turnips, celery, savory herbs, salt, bread crust, and rice.

  4. Enclose the peppercorns, cloves, and mace in a clean muslin bag and add to the pan.

  5. Cover and stew for another 30 minutes or until the meat is tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the crust, spice bag, and herbs.

  2. Serve the meat on slices of toasted bread, pouring the stewing liquid 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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stewing liquid as they soften.
Turnips
Contribute mild earthy flavor and soften into the stew during cooking.
Rice
Thickens the stewing liquid as its starch releases during cooking.
Bread crust
Adds flavor and helps thicken the broth as it breaks down in the liquid.

The step that matters

Simmer gently rather than boil. A gentle simmer lets collagen in the beef break down slowly into tender meat. A hard boil toughens muscle fibres and can make the broth cloudy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, celery, bread, rice, clove):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, celery, bread, rice, clove. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipes