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Italian Stew

A slow‑cooked beef stew with onions, vinegar, spices, and green peppers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Italian Stew

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a large pot, cook the beef and onions together for 2 hours.

  2. Add the vinegar, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, cumin seed, green peppers, and salt, and add water as needed.

  3. Cook until the beef is tender.

  4. Thicken the stew with flour before serving.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + cumintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  5. Clove + cumintop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,306 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, slow cooking.
Onions
Add sweetness and body to the stew as they soften and cook down.
Mild vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the rich, slow-cooked meat.
Green peppers
Contribute a fresh, slightly bitter vegetable flavor and some texture to the stew.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a richer, more body-filled stew.

The step that matters

Cook until the beef is tender. Beef cuts need long, slow cooking so their connective tissue breaks down into gelatin. Stopping early leaves the meat tough, so check tenderness rather than relying only on the timer.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, vinegar, cinnamon, allspice, clove, cumin, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, vinegar, cinnamon, allspice, clove, cumin, 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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