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Stewed Brisket of Beef

A slow‑cooked beef brisket stew with carrots, turnips, onions, celery, and a ketchup‑mustard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Stewed Brisket of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stew

  1. Place the brisket with hard fat in a stewpot with ½ cup of water.

  2. Bring to a boil and skim the surface thoroughly.

  3. Add the chopped carrots, turnips, onions, celery, and peppercorns.

  4. Stew until the meat is extremely tender.

  5. Remove all flat bones and fat from the soup.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, mix ½ pint of the soup with 1 tablespoon of ketchup, 1 teaspoon of mustard, a little flour, butter, and salt.

  2. Boil the sauce for a few minutes.

  3. Pour the sauce around the meat.

  4. Serve the soup and meat in a tureen or separately on a dish garnished with vegetables.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stewed soup as they soften.
Onions
Contribute savory depth and aroma to the broth as they cook.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by swelling with liquid as it boils.
Ketchup
Adds acidity and sweetness to the sauce, giving it a tangy flavour.

The step that matters

Stew until the meat is extremely tender. Brisket is a tough cut rich in connective tissue. Long, gentle simmering breaks that tissue down into gelatin, so the meat becomes tender; stopping early leaves it chewy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, celery, ketchup, mustard, 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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