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Stewed Rump of Beef

A slow‑cooked stew of rump beef simmered with wine, vinegar, spices, and walnut ketchup, finished with mushrooms and a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,523 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Stewed Rump of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Half roast the beef.

  2. Place it in a stewpan with water, vinegar, and red wine.

  3. Add walnut ketchup, mace, shallot, lemon pickle, cayenne pepper, and salt.

  4. Cover the stewpan and simmer gently for 2-3 hours, depending on the size of the beef.

Make the gravy

  1. Remove the beef and keep it warm.

  2. Skim the scum from the gravy and strain it.

  3. Add mushrooms, port wine, and Harvey's sauce to the gravy.

  4. Thicken the gravy with flour and butter.

Serve

  1. Pour the gravy over the beef and garnish with pickles, forcemeat balls, and horseradish.

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. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Walnut + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Vinegar + red winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together575 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Vinegar + shallottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Roast beef
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender through slow, moist simmering.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the cooking liquid and gravy.
Mushrooms
Add savoury, earthy flavour and body to the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy by swelling with liquid as it heats.
Butter
Enriches the thickened gravy with fat, adding richness and smooth texture.
Vinegar
Adds sharpness that balances the rich beef and wine flavours.

The step that matters

Simmering the beef gently. Gentle, covered simmering keeps the liquid below a hard boil so the tough connective tissue in the rump softens slowly without the meat drying out or toughening. Boiling hard would make the beef stringy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, vinegar, red wine, walnut, ketchup, shallot, lemon):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, vinegar, red wine, walnut, ketchup, shallot, lemon. 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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