Skip to main content
Main

Beef Stew

A slow-cooked beef stew with onions, herbs, ketchup, flour, allspice, lemon, Worcestershire sauce, and brown sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Summer savory and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 125 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Beef Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut the beef into 1-inch pieces and sauté in dripping with the sliced onion until the onion is fried.

  2. Cover the beef with cold water and simmer on low heat until the meat is tender.

  3. Let it sit covered for 5 to 6 hours or overnight.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the fat an hour before serving, then add summer savory, sweet marjoram, chopped onion, and parsley.

  2. Bring to a steady boil, then stir in tomato ketchup, browned flour, allspice mixed with cold water, lemon juice, and Worcestershire sauce.

  3. Boil sharply, then add the brown sherry 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. Summer savory + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together125 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Marjoram + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,979 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Summer savory + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together241 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Summer savory + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together263 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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
Slow simmering turns the tough pieces tender and gives the stew its meaty body.
Browned flour
Thickens the cooking liquid and adds a toasted, deeper flavour to the gravy.
Tomato ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity that rounds out the savoury gravy.
Brown sherry
Adds aromatic depth and a rich, wine-based sweetness near the end of cooking.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, heavy flavours of the stew.

The step that matters

Simmer the beef gently until tender. Low, steady heat breaks down the connective tissue in the beef slowly. Boiling hard during this stage toughens the meat fibres and leaves it dry and chewy.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, summer savory, marjoram, parsley, ketchup, flour):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, summer savory, marjoram, parsley, ketchup, 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.

More beef stew recipes

with Dumplings 30Brazilian 20French 20Spiced 17Pudding 16English 15 See all 357 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipes