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The Dinner Question

A hearty beef stew with force-meat balls, eels, mushrooms, oysters, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 28 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 145 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

The Dinner Question

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the stew

  1. Place the beef in a stewpan.

  2. Add enough cold water to cover the beef and a little coarse sea salt.

  3. Slice the onion, carrot, and turnip and fry the sliced vegetables in butter until light brown.

  4. Add the fried vegetables, mace, and bay leaves to the stewpan with the beef.

  5. Simmer gently for four hours.

Make the force-meat balls

  1. For the force-meat balls, chop the oysters, capers, lemon peel, egg yolk, baked onion, parsley, mushrooms, marjoram, bread crumbs, veal or beef, ham or bacon, nutmeg, and cayenne very fine.

  2. Beat the egg and mix it with the chopped ingredients, ensuring the mixture is not too wet.

  3. Roll the mixture into balls the size of small walnuts.

  4. Coat the balls in flour.

  5. Bake the balls in the oven at 400°F (200°C) for ten minutes.

  6. Set the baked balls aside.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the beef from the stewpan.

  2. Strain the gravy back into the stewpan.

  3. Cut the eels into three-inch pieces and add them to the gravy, stewing for about twenty minutes.

  4. Skim off the fat.

  5. Add the force-meat balls, whole mushrooms, and oysters with their liquor mixed with flour, and stew for five more minutes.

  6. Finally, stir in the port wine.

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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

Beef
Provides the meat and rich flavour that the long simmer draws into the gravy.
Egg
Binds the chopped force-meat ingredients together so the balls hold their shape.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture from the mixture, giving the force-meat balls a lighter, softer texture.
Flour
Coats the balls and thickens the gravy when mixed with oyster liquor.
Eels
Add rich, fatty body to the gravy as they stew in it.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth to the finished gravy.

The step that matters

Keep the force-meat mixture not too wet before rolling. Excess moisture from the chopped ingredients and egg makes the balls loose and likely to break apart in the gravy, so the mixture should be firm enough to roll and hold its shape.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, carrot, turnip, butter, oyster, capers):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, carrot, turnip, butter, oyster, capers. 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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