Skip to main content
Main

Leg of Beef Stew

A hearty stew made with leg of beef, carrots, turnip, onions, and seasoned with vinegar, dripping, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Leg of Beef Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the beef into convenient pieces.

  2. Dip the pieces in vinegar to tenderize.

Make the stew

  1. Melt the dripping in a stewpan over medium heat.

  2. Fry the onions until brown.

  3. Pour off the fat.

  4. Add the beef and boiling water.

  5. Cover and simmer gently for about 4 hours.

  6. One hour before finishing, add the chopped vegetables.

  7. Mix the flour with a little cold water to make a smooth paste.

  8. Add the paste to the stew.

  9. Stir until it boils.

  10. Season to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

Leg of beef
Becomes tender during the long, gentle simmer, giving the stew its main body.
Vinegar
Acidity helps soften the surface of the beef before cooking.
Onions
Browning in the dripping builds deeper, savoury flavour in the stew.
Flour
Mixed into a paste and stirred in, it thickens the cooking liquid.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stew as they cook in the liquid.
Turnip
Adds earthy flavour and soft texture to the stew.

The step that matters

Simmer gently with the lid on. A gentle simmer keeps the beef tender and prevents it from toughening. Boiling hard makes muscle fibres contract and dries the meat out.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes