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To Stew a Piece Op Beep, or Make Beef Bouilli

A stew of beef with carrots, turnip, onions, and ketchup-flavored gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

To Stew a Piece Op Beep, or Make Beef Bouilli

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the beef

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

  2. Add the beef and brown it on all sides.

  3. Remove the beef from the pan.

  4. Place 2-3 skewers in the bottom of the pan.

  5. Return the beef to the pan, preventing it from sticking with the skewers.

  6. Add enough water to half cover the meat.

Stew

  1. Cover the pan and stew slowly for about 2 hours.

  2. If desired, add onions while stewing.

Finish the gravy and serve

  1. Remove the meat.

  2. Thicken the gravy with butter and Oswego.

  3. Add the boiled carrot and turnip to the gravy.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, and ketchup.

  5. Boil for a few minutes.

  6. Serve in a hash dish.

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

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 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

Beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during slow stewing.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps brown the beef at the start.
Onions
Add sweetness and savory flavor to the gravy as they cook.
Oswego
Thickens the gravy so it coats the meat and vegetables.

The step that matters

Browning the beef on all sides. Browning creates deep, savory flavors through the Maillard reaction. Pale meat gives a weaker gravy, so the surfaces need real colour before water is added.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Onionthe original
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, meat, carrot, turnip, pepper, ketchup. 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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