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Meat Stew with Dumplings

A beef stew with dumplings made from flour, baking powder, butter, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Meat Stew with Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stew

  1. Cut the meat into small pieces, removing the fat.

  2. Render the fat and brown the meat in it.

  3. Cover the browned meat with boiling water and boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Reduce heat and cook until the meat is tender, about 3 hours on the stove or 5 hours in a slow cooker.

  5. Add carrots, turnips, and onions during the last hour of cooking.

  6. Add potatoes 15 minutes before serving.

  7. Thicken the stew with flour diluted in cold water.

Make the dumplings

  1. For dumplings, mix and sift the dry ingredients.

  2. Work in the butter with your fingers and gradually add milk.

  3. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thick and cut with a biscuit cutter.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Beef
Provides the main savoury flavour and, when cooked slowly, becomes tender in the stew.
Potatoes
Add starch that gives body to the stew and soft, filling pieces.
Flour
Thickens the stew liquid and gives the dumplings their structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dumpling dough so the dumplings rise and turn light.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the dumplings tender and rich in flavour.
Milk
Moistens the dumpling dough so it binds and holds together.

The step that matters

Add the dumpling dough and cook them through. Dumplings need to be cooked covered so steam cooks the dough through and makes them light; lifting the lid lets steam escape and can leave them dense. Baking powder works best when the dough is handled gently and not overworked, which keeps it tender.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, potato, flour, turnip, carrot, pepper, butter):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, potato, flour, turnip, carrot, pepper, butter. 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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