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Beef, Minced, Savoury

A savory minced beef stew cooked with onions, herbs, butter, wine, stock, and mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Beef, Minced, Savoury

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a stewpan, combine minced onions, thyme, parsley, chives, and tarragon with butter over gentle heat until partially cooked.

  2. Stir in flour and cook until the mixture is brown.

  3. Add salt, pepper, white wine, and beef stock.

Simmer and finish

  1. Once the mixture is ready, add the minced cold beef and simmer gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Before serving, stir in the mustard.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Thyme + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together528 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Parsley + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Chive + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together589 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften into the base and add sweetness and body to the stew.
Butter
Carries the herbs and onions gently and adds richness.
Flour
Thickens the liquid and gives the stew a smoother body.
White wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the stew base.
Beef stock
Provides the main liquid and savory beefy flavor.
Cold beef
Supplies the meat that becomes tender during gentle simmering.

The step that matters

Cook the flour until brown. Flour must be cooked long enough to lose its raw taste and develop color before liquid is added. Stirring keeps it from scorching and lumping, which would give a pasty, uneven thickening.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (thyme, parsley, chive, tarragon, butter, flour, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against thyme, parsley, chive, tarragon, butter, flour, pepper. 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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