Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Beef

A slow-cooked beef dish with onions, celery, carrot, turnips, sorrel, and a gravy thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the beef

  1. Stew the brisket in 5 quarts of water in a large pot.

  2. Add the studded onions, celery, carrot, turnips, sorrel leaves, black pepper, and salt.

  3. Stew gently for 6 hours.

Prepare the turnips and gravy

  1. Scrape the turnips.

  2. Fry the turnips in butter until brown.

  3. Add pepper, salt, and a little cayenne to the turnips.

  4. Thicken the gravy with flour and butter.

  5. Pour the gravy over the beef with the carrots and turnips.

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 + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Brisket of beef
Long gentle stewing turns the tough cut tender and gives the broth its rich meaty flavor.
Flour
Starch thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy that clings to the meat.
Butter
Fat browns the turnips and adds richness to the gravy.
Turnips
Frying in butter browns their surfaces, adding sweetness and savory depth.
Onions
Slow cooking softens them and adds sweetness and aroma to the broth.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 6 hours. A gentle simmer rather than a hard boil breaks down the connective tissue in brisket slowly, so the meat becomes tender without tightening and toughening its fibers.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, clove, celery, carrot, turnip, sorrel, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, clove, celery, carrot, turnip, sorrel, pepper. 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.

More stewed beef recipes

Steaks 20Steak 9Tongue 6Kidney 5Loin 3Shin 3 See all 14 →

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes