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Meat and Vegetable Stew

A hearty stew of beef or lamb with carrots, potatoes, peas, onion, garlic, and water, simmered until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Meat and Vegetable Stew

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Heat oil in a large pot over medium heat.

  2. Add chopped onion and minced garlic; sauté until soft.

Make the stew

  1. Add meat and brown on all sides.

  2. Pour in water and bring to a boil.

  3. Add mixed vegetables, salt, and pepper.

  4. Reduce heat and simmer for 1 hour until meat is tender.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Potato + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,517 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Browning builds savoury flavour, and slow simmering turns it tender.
Onion
Softened by sautéing, it adds sweetness and a base flavour to the stew.
Garlic
Gently cooked, it adds aroma to the base of the stew.
Mixed vegetables
Carrots, potatoes and peas add body, sweetness and texture to the stew.

The step that matters

Brown the meat on all sides. Browning meat in hot oil creates flavour through the Maillard reaction. Crowding the pot or stopping early leaves the meat grey and less savoury.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, carrot, potato, onion, clove, garlic, pepper):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Lentilsfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, carrot, potato, onion, clove, garlic, 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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