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Beef

A slow‑cooked beef joint with vegetables, broth, and optional mushrooms and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot 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 ↓

Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Bind the beef firmly and cover it with strong cold beef broth or gravy.

  2. Stew gently for 6 to 8 hours, skimming off any scum.

  3. Add the onion with cloves, celery, carrots, turnips, and savory herbs.

  4. Check if the beef is tender by probing with a sharp skewer.

Finish the stew

  1. Half roast the joint.

  2. Stew the roast in strong gravy with mushrooms and sherry or Madeira for the last hour.

  3. Keep hot while thickening a portion of the gravy with a brown roux and seasoning to taste.

  4. Season the forcemeat balls.

  5. Fry the balls until golden brown.

  6. Garnish the stew with the fried forcemeat balls.

  7. Remove the fillets and serve with rich Espagnole sauce or brown gravy.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef joint
Provides the meat that becomes tender through long, gentle stewing.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aroma to the broth as it softens during stewing.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the gravy as they cook down.
Mushrooms
Add savory, earthy flavor and moisture to the stew.
Sherry or madeira
Adds depth, sweetness and aroma to the gravy.

The step that matters

Stewing the beef gently for 6 to 8 hours. Low, slow heat breaks down connective tissue in the beef into gelatin, making it tender. Boiling hard toughens the meat and clouds the gravy, so keep the liquid barely simmering and skim off scum.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, celery, carrot, turnip, mushroom, sherry, 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.

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