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Beef Stew

A hearty stew of beef, onions, carrots, turnips, and potatoes simmered with water and seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip 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 ↓

Beef Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Remove fat from the beef and set aside ½ cup of the best pieces.

  2. Soak the remaining beef and bone in cold water for 1 hour, then heat until bubbling.

  3. Season the reserved beef with salt and roll it in flour.

Brown and simmer

  1. Melt fat in a frying pan, brown the sliced onion, then add the floured beef.

  2. Combine the browned onion and beef with the stew and cook for 1.5 hours on low heat.

  3. Add the diced vegetables and flour mixed with ½ cup cold water, then cook for 1 hour or until tender.

Serve

  1. Remove the bone, season, and serve.

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. Carrot + turniptop 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. Carrot + potatotop 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 from leg
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, slow simmering.
Flour
Coats the beef for browning and, mixed with water, thickens the stew liquid.
Potatoes
Soften during simmering and add starch that helps body the stew.
Onion
Browns in fat to add savoury, sweet depth to the stew.

The step that matters

Browning the floured beef and onion. Browning in hot fat creates savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Crowding the pan steams the meat instead, leaving it grey and bland.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

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