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A slow‑cooked beef stew flavored with sugar, mace, cloves, nutmeg, cayenne, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the beef

  1. Rub the beef and turn it once every 24 hours for 12 days.

  2. Wash the beef but do not soak it; skewer it into good form.

Cook

  1. Place the beef in a stewpan or saucepan nearly its size.

  2. Pour in 1½ pints of beef broth and bring to a boil.

  3. Skim off the scum, then add the onion, herbs, and carrots.

  4. Let it simmer gently for 4½ hours.

  5. If not serving hot, leave it in the broth until nearly cold.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Nutmeg + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

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

  4. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Is the main component; long curing and slow simmering make it tender.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the salt used in the cure.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and helps preserve it during curing.
Beef broth
Provides liquid for simmering and carries flavour into the meat.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the broth as they cook.

The step that matters

Simmering the beef. Keeping the simmer gentle lets the meat become tender without the proteins tightening and toughening. A hard boil can make the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, sugar, pepper, clove, nutmeg, onion, thyme):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, sugar, pepper, clove, nutmeg, onion, thyme. 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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