Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Beef

A slow‑cooked beef stew with turnips, carrots, onions, and optional cloves, finished with marjoram, ketchup, and a flour slurry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Stewed Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the beef in a pot and cover it with water.

  2. Skim the pot well, then add salt, turnips, carrots, onions, pepper, and cloves if desired.

Cook

  1. Boil gently for 4 to 5 hours.

  2. Shortly before serving, add sweet marjoram, tomato ketchup, and flour mixed with a little cold water.

  3. Optionally, add a light crust 10 minutes before serving.

Serve

  1. Serve in a deep platter.

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. Carrot + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together687 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Clove + marjoramtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Turnip + marjoramtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together367 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + marjoramtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Mixed with cold water and stirred in, it thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy.
Tomato ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity, deepening the savory flavor of the stew.
Onions
Release sweetness and aromatic flavor into the broth as they cook.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the stew as they soften during cooking.
Turnips
Contribute mild sweetness and soft texture as they cook in the broth.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 4 to 5 hours. A gentle simmer keeps the liquid from rapidly evaporating or toughening the meat. Vigorous boiling makes muscle fibers contract and dries the meat, while slow cooking breaks down connective tissue into tender, flavorful gelatin.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, turnip, carrot, onion, pepper, marjoram, tomato):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, turnip, carrot, onion, pepper, marjoram, tomato. 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.

More beef stew recipes

with Dumplings 30Brazilian 20French 20Spiced 17Pudding 16English 15 See all 357 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipes