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Beef Stew

A hearty stew of beef, onions, carrots, turnip, potatoes, and green pepper simmered in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 meat

  1. Remove the fat and cut the meat into one-inch pieces.

  2. Set aside ½ cup of the best pieces of meat.

  3. Soak the remaining meat and bones in cold water for one hour.

  4. Heat until it bubbles.

  5. Season the reserved meat and roll it in flour.

  6. Melt the fat in a frying pan.

  7. Remove scraps.

  8. Brown the sliced onion and floured meat in the hot fat.

Make the stew

  1. Add both to the stew and cook for two hours at a simmer.

  2. Mix the vegetables and flour with ½ cup cold water.

  3. Add to the stew.

  4. Cook for one hour or until the meat and vegetables are tender.

  5. Remove the bone.

  6. Season.

  7. 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
Provides the main protein; slow simmering over hours turns its connective tissue tender.
Flour
Coats the meat and thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy-like sauce.
Potatoes
Absorb the broth and soften into the body of the stew, adding starch.
Onion
Browning in fat builds savory flavor that carries into the stew.

The step that matters

Browning the floured meat and onion. Searing in hot fat creates browned flavor 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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