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Beef Stewed with Raisins

A beef stew cooked with raisins, butter, browned flour, and sweet almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Beef Stewed with Raisins

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. Boil the beef in the beef broth until tender.

  2. Cut the beef into pieces.

Finish the stew

  1. Add the raisins, butter, browned flour, and chopped almonds.

  2. Allow the mixture to stew for a while until heated through.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Forms the main body of the stew and becomes tender as its connective tissue breaks down in liquid.
Beef broth
Provides the cooking liquid that softens the beef and adds savory flavor to the stew.
Raisins
Add sweetness and a chewy texture that contrasts with the savory meat.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, rounder mouthfeel.
Browned flour
Thickens the stew and adds a toasted, nutty flavor.
Sweet almonds
Add crunch and a mild nutty aroma to the finished stew.

The step that matters

Boil the beef until tender. Connective tissue in beef breaks down slowly during long, gentle simmering. Rushing the cook or boiling too hard can leave the meat tough or stringy, so it needs patience at a steady, moderate heat.

“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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