Skip to main content
Main

Brisket of Beef Stewed

A stew of beef brisket cooked with water, port wine, spices, and served with boiled vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beef and port wine work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 626 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Brisket of Beef Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the beef

  1. Cover the brisket of beef with water in a large pot and stew the beef until tender.

  2. Remove the beef from the pot and bone the beef.

Make the gravy

  1. Skim off the fat and strain the gravy.

  2. Add the port wine and flavor the gravy with the bag of spices.

Serve

  1. Garnish the beef with boiled vegetables around it 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. Beef + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together626 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Brisket of beef
Forms the main body of the dish; long stewing breaks its connective tissue into gelatin, making it tender.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth to the gravy.
Spices
Infuse the gravy with aroma as they steep in the liquid.

The step that matters

Stew the beef until tender. Keep the liquid at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil. Brisket is rich in tough connective tissue, which needs a long, low cook to break down into gelatin; a fast boil tightens the muscle fibres and leaves the meat dry and chewy.

“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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes