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Trembling Beef

A slow‑cooked beef stew with onions, turnips, carrots, gravy, and ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 ↓

Trembling Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. Boil the brisket of beef gently for 5 to 6 hours until very tender.

  2. Season the boiling water with salt, allspice, onions, turnips, and carrot.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter, then stir in the flour until smooth.

  2. Add the gravy and ketchup, along with small pieces of turnips and carrots.

  3. Stew until the roots are tender, then season with pepper and salt.

  4. Skim off the fat, place the beef in a dish, and pour the sauce over it.

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. Allspice + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,021 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Allspice + turniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together445 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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 very tender through long, gentle simmering.
Butter
Melted with flour to form a roux that thickens the sauce and adds richness.
Flour
Forms a roux with melted butter that thickens the gravy into a smooth sauce.
Turnips
Add body and a mild sweetness as they soften in the sauce.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and color while softening into the stew.
Onions
Add savory depth and aroma to the cooking liquid and sauce.

The step that matters

Make the roux smooth before adding the gravy. Stirring flour into melted butter until smooth coats the starch grains in fat so they disperse evenly. Adding liquid to clumped flour leaves lumps that are hard to remove from the sauce.

Swap the allspice

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

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, turnip, carrot, butter, flour, 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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