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Modern Cookery

A slow‑cooked beef stew flavored with sugar, mace, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cayenne, sea salt, broth, onion, herbs, carrots, and optional juniper berries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Modern Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the beef

  1. Rub the beef and turn it once every 24 hours for 12 days.

Prepare and cook

  1. Wash the beef but do not soak it; skewer or bind it into shape.

  2. Place the beef in a stewpan or saucepan nearly its size.

  3. Pour in 1½ pints of beef broth and bring to a boil.

  4. Skim off the scum, then add the onion, herbs, and carrots.

  5. Simmer gently for 4½ hours.

Serve

  1. If not serving hot, leave the beef in its broth until nearly cold.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Nutmeg + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

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

  4. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat during curing and seasons it deeply.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the salt in the cure.
Beef broth
Supplies moisture and savory flavor as the meat cooks.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 4½ hours. A gentle simmer lets the connective tissue in the beef break down slowly, leaving it tender. A hard boil tightens the muscle fibres and toughens the meat, and it can also cloud the broth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, sugar, pepper, clove, nutmeg, onion, thyme):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, sugar, pepper, clove, nutmeg, onion, thyme. 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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