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Brazilian Stew

A slow-cooked beef stew with vegetables, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, peppercorns, nutmeg, and sea salt.

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 ↓

Brazilian Stew

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the meat into thick, small pieces.

  2. Dip each piece in vinegar.

  3. Place the meat in a stewpan with the sliced vegetables.

Cook

  1. Heat the meat and vegetables very slowly without adding water.

  2. Add salt, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, peppercorns, and a grate of nutmeg.

  3. Cover the pan and simmer for 3 hours, shaking occasionally.

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. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 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

Lean leg of beef
Its connective tissue softens during long simmering, giving the stew a tender texture.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the rich, slow-cooked flavour.
Onions
Soften and turn sweet as they cook, adding body and aroma to the stew.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savoury, fermented depth that rounds out the beef flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds fresh acidity that lifts and balances the savoury stew.

The step that matters

Heat the meat and vegetables very slowly without adding water. Gentle heat lets the meat and vegetables release their own juices gradually, forming a flavourful liquid. Rapid heating can scorch the bottom of the pan and toughen the meat before it has time to become tender.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, onion, vinegar, sauce, nutmeg):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, onion, vinegar, sauce, nutmeg. 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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