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Brunswick Stew

A stew of beef or veal with onions, beans, tomatoes, and peppers, simmered slowly in fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Brunswick Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown the meat

  1. Wipe the beef or veal and season with ginger, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  2. In a deep kettle, heat the fat and add the chopped onion.

  3. Add the meat and brown quickly on both sides.

Simmer the stew

  1. Pour in the water, cover tightly, and cook slowly for one hour.

  2. Add the string beans (or canned beans), tomatoes, and sliced green pepper.

  3. Cook slowly until the vegetables are tender.

Serve

  1. Remove the meat to a platter and pour the vegetables over it.

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. Beans + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Onion + beanstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  5. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 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 or veal
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through slow cooking in the covered kettle.
Fat
Carries heat for browning the meat and softening the onion, adding richness.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and liquid that build the body of the stew sauce.
String beans
Contribute texture and body as they cook until tender in the stew.

The step that matters

Brown the meat quickly on both sides. Searing creates browned flavor through the Maillard reaction on the meat surface. Crowding the pan or letting the meat steam instead of brown leaves the stew tasting flat.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, beans, tomato, pepper):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, beans, tomato, 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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