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French Stew

A beef stew with onion, carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, tomatoes, and a vinegar-sugar broth, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

French Stew

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Add the beef to a large pot and cover with water.

  2. Chop the onion, carrot, turnip, celery, and parsley, and add them to the pot.

  3. Add the tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, salt, and pepper.

  4. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until the beef is tender.

  5. Remove the beef, thicken the gravy with flour, 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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main body of the stew and becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the broth and gravy.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and savory depth to the broth, colouring the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy as it binds with the broth.

The step that matters

Simmer until the beef is tender. Tough connective tissue in beef breaks down slowly at a gentle simmer. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and leave the broth cloudy, so keep the heat low and the liquid moving only gently.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, vinegar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, vinegar. 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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