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Meat Stew with Dumplings

A hearty beef stew with turnips, carrots, potatoes, and homemade dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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 ↓

Meat Stew with Dumplings

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the beef

  1. Cut the beef into small pieces, removing the fat.

  2. Render the fat in a pot and brown the meat in it.

  3. Cover the browned meat with boiling water and boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Reduce heat and simmer until the meat is tender, about 3 hours on the stove or 5 hours in a fireless cooker.

Add the vegetables and thicken

  1. Add carrots, turnips, onions, salt, and pepper during the last hour of cooking.

  2. Add potatoes 15 minutes before serving.

  3. Thicken the stew with flour diluted in cold water.

Make and cook the dumplings

  1. For dumplings, mix and sift the dry ingredients.

  2. Work in the butter with your fingertips and gradually add milk.

  3. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thick and cut with a biscuit cutter.

  4. Cook dumplings in the stew during the last 15 minutes of cooking.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + oniontop 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. Turnip + oniontop 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 meat, which becomes tender through long, slow simmering.
Flour
Thickens the stew liquid as it heats, giving it a fuller body.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dumpling dough, helping it rise and turn light.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the dumpling dough and gives it richness.
Potatoes
Absorb stew liquid and soften, adding body and starch to the broth.

The step that matters

Cooking the beef until tender. Collagen in cheaper cuts breaks down only with long, low simmering. Cooking too hard or too briefly leaves the meat tough and chewy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, turnip, carrot, potato, flour, pepper, milk):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, turnip, carrot, potato, flour, pepper, milk. 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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