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Beef Gobbets

A beef stew with mace, cloves, pepper, celery, turnips, carrots, herbs, bread crust, and barley or rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Beef Gobbets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew the beef

  1. Cut the beef into small pieces.

  2. Put the beef into a stew pan and cover with water.

  3. Stew for 1 hour.

Add the vegetables and seasonings

  1. Add mace, cloves, whole pepper in a muslin bag, and celery.

  2. Add salt, turnips, carrots, parsley, sweet herbs, bread crust, and barley or rice.

  3. Cover and stew until tender.

  4. Remove the herbs, spices, and bread.

Serve

  1. Serve with toasted French roll cut into four parts, pouring the meat and sauce over it.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 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
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender as it stews slowly in water.
Barley or rice
Thickens the broth as its starch releases during long simmering.
Turnips
Add mild sweetness and body to the broth as they soften.
Carrots
Add sweetness and color to the broth as they cook.
Bread crust
Helps thicken the broth as it softens and breaks down.

The step that matters

Stew until tender. The beef and vegetables need a long, gentle simmer so connective tissue breaks down and the meat softens. Cooking too fast or too briefly leaves the meat tough.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Macethe original

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