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Brisket of Beef, Stewed Savoury

A slow‑cooked beef brisket stew with wine, catsup, spices, carrots, turnips, and optional truffles or morels.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Brisket of Beef, Stewed Savoury

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Stew the brisket of beef in enough water to cover it until tender.

  2. Remove the bones and skim off the fat.

Make the stew

  1. Take 1 pint of the cooking liquid and add ⅓ cup red port wine, walnut or mushroom catsup, and salt.

  2. Tie whole white pepper and mace in muslin and add the muslin bundle to the pot.

  3. Stew everything together for a short time.

  4. Prepare boiled and diced carrots and turnips.

  5. Add the carrots and turnips to the beef, placing some in the serving dish.

  6. Optionally, add truffles and morels.

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. Walnut + carrottop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together506 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. White pepper + macetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Walnut + turniptop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together139 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Beef + carrottop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,606 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

Brisket of beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long slow stewing.
Red port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the cooking liquid.
Walnut or mushroom catsup
Adds concentrated savoury, umami flavour to the sauce.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and a tender, soft texture to the stew.
Turnips
Add a mild, slightly peppery flavour and soft texture to the stew.

The step that matters

Stew the brisket until tender. Brisket is a tough cut rich in connective tissue. Slow, gentle stewing in liquid is needed to break that tissue down into gelatin; stopping early leaves the meat chewy.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, meat, port wine, walnut, mace, carrot, turnip):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, meat, port wine, walnut, mace, carrot, turnip. 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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