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Exeter Stew

A beef stew with onion, carrot, turnip, and gravy made from flour and dripping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Exeter Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the beef into neat pieces and trim off the fat.

  2. Prepare the vegetables and slice them thinly.

Brown and simmer

  1. Sprinkle the beef with flour and fry until nicely browned in the dripping.

  2. Add the vegetables, seasoning, and water.

  3. Cook gently until tender, about 2 hours.

  4. Thicken the gravy with flour mixed with a little cold water.

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 + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 slow, gentle cooking.
Flour
Coats the beef to brown it and thickens the gravy.
Dripping
Carries heat for frying and adds richness and browning to the beef.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma to the gravy as it cooks.

The step that matters

Fry the floured beef until nicely browned. Browning the floured surface creates flavour through the Maillard reaction. Crowding the pan or stopping too early leaves the beef pale and the gravy flat. Dry meat browns best.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, 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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