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Brown Beef Stew

A hearty beef stew flavored with marjoram, thyme, parsley, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, wine, lemon, mushrooms, and fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Marjoram and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,225 recipes. Both carry terpineol, which smells pine, woody. The science ↓

Brown Beef Stew

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the beef into strips two inches long and add the minced onion.

  2. Cover with water and cook on low heat for two hours.

  3. Add the mushrooms and simmer for one hour.

  4. Stir in the Worcestershire sauce, tomato ketchup, lemon juice, wine, and browned flour.

  5. Bring to a boil, then line a deep dish with small squares of fried bread and pour the stew 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. Marjoram + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Marjoram + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,979 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Thyme + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

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

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 body of the stew and becomes tender during long, slow cooking.
Browned flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so the stew becomes a rich, body-filled sauce.
Mushrooms
Add savory, earthy flavor and a soft texture to the stew.
Wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavor to the sauce.
Fried bread
Soaks up the stew at the base of the dish, adding a crisp-to-soft contrast.

The step that matters

Cook the beef on low heat for two hours. Beef is made of tough connective tissue that breaks down slowly at a gentle simmer. Cooking it too hard can toughen the meat, so keeping the heat low lets it become tender.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, marjoram, thyme, parsley, flour, sauce, tomato):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, marjoram, thyme, parsley, flour, sauce, tomato. 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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