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Hotch-potch

A hearty beef stew with beans, carrots, onions, celery, turnips, cauliflower, and a butter‑flour roux, seasoned with ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Hotch-potch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stew

  1. Mince the beef using a coarse cutter and place it in a stew pan with the fat beef or veal, water or stock, and beans.

  2. Bring to a boil, then add chopped carrots, onions, celery, turnips, and cauliflower.

  3. Cover lightly and simmer for about 3 hours.

Thicken and season

  1. Melt the butter and mix with the flour until smooth, then let it brown.

  2. Dilute the mixture with some broth and add it to the stew.

  3. Season with ketchup and adjust to taste when it boils again.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Beans + cauliflowertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lean beef
Provides the main meaty body and savoury flavour of the stew.
Beans
Add body and substance, thickening the stew as they soften during the long simmer.
Butter and flour
Brown together into a roux that thickens the broth and adds a nutty, toasted flavour.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and colour as they soften during the simmer.

The step that matters

Browning the butter and flour. Flour cooked in butter needs to be stirred until smooth and allowed to brown evenly. Undercooked flour tastes raw and pasty, while over-browned flour turns bitter and loses thickening power.

Swap the cauliflower

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, beans, carrot, onion, celery, turnip, butter):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Cauliflowerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, beans, carrot, onion, celery, turnip, butter. 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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