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Beef Stew with Corn Flour Dumpling

A hearty beef stew thickened with a corn and wheat flour dumpling topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and wheat match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 465 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Beef Stew with Corn Flour Dumpling

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce and stew

  1. In a frying pan, heat the suet and brown the pieces of beef.

  2. Lift the beef with a skimmer and transfer to a saucepan.

  3. In the remaining fat, rub in the flour and brown it carefully.

  4. Add the water to the fat and flour, stirring constantly until it boils.

  5. Strain the mixture over the meat, cover, and simmer gently for one hour.

  6. If desired, add a small onion halfway through cooking and season with salt.

Make and cook the dumplings

  1. In a bowl, mix the corn flour, wheat flour, salt, and baking powder.

  2. Add enough milk to moisten the mixture without making it a batter.

  3. Using a teaspoon dipped in the meat sauce, place spoonfuls of the dumpling mixture on top of the meat.

  4. Cover the kettle and cook for ten minutes without lifting the lid.

Serve

  1. Serve by arranging the dumplings around the meat and straining the sauce over.

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. Corn + wheattop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Beef + wheattop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together319 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Browned in the fat, it thickens the sauce as it cooks with the water.
Suet
Rendered fat used for browning the beef and adding richness to the sauce.
Corn flour
Forms the body of the dumplings and gives them a distinct, slightly sweet flavour.
Wheat flour
Adds structure to the dumplings so they hold their shape while steaming.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the moist dough, helping the dumplings rise and turn light.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in the fat. Flour browned slowly in fat develops a nutty colour and flavour and thickens the sauce. If it is rushed or burns, it turns bitter and dark, and it can form lumps when water is added.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, flour, corn, wheat, milk):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, corn, wheat, 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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