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Beef and Tomato Stew

A hearty stew of beef and tomatoes, simmered slowly with browned flour thickening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,448 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beef and Tomato Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Sear the beef

  1. Heat the beef in a pot until well seared and slightly browned, being careful not to scorch it.

Stew the beef

  1. Add 1 pint of boiling water, cover, and stew slowly until done, about 1.5 hours.

Make the tomato sauce

  1. Peel and slice the tomatoes thinly.

  2. Stew the sliced tomatoes in a separate pot, stirring often, until perfectly smooth, about 1 hour.

  3. Thicken the tomato sauce with a little browned flour mixed with cold water, stirring in and cooking for 10 minutes.

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. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the meat that becomes tender through slow, moist stewing.
Browned flour
Thickens the tomato sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Tomatoes
Supply acidity and body, breaking down into a smooth sauce when stewed.

The step that matters

Searing the beef without scorching it. Browning the meat surface builds deep, savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Heat that is too high burns the sugars and proteins, leaving bitter notes that carry into the stew.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour. 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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