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To Stew Brisket of Beef

A stew of brisket with vegetables, flavored with ketchup, port wine, mustard, and a sauce of soup, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery 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 ↓

To Stew Brisket of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Place brisket in stew pot with ½ cup water. Bring to a boil and skim thoroughly.

  2. Add carrots, turnips, onions, celery, and peppercorns. Stew until extremely tender.

  3. Remove the flat bones and discard all the fat from the soup.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Serve the soup and meat in a tureen, or serve the soup alone and the meat on a dish garnished with vegetables.

  2. For the sauce, mix ½ pint soup with 1 tablespoon ketchup, ⅓ cup port wine, 1 teaspoon mustard, a little flour, a bit of butter, and salt. Boil for a few minutes.

  3. Pour the sauce around the meat and garnish with chopped capers, walnuts, red cabbage, pickled cucumbers, and chives or parsley.

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 + celerytop 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 + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Brisket of beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender and flavours the soup during long stewing.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the meat rather than running thin.
Port wine
Adds depth and a touch of sweetness to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the sauce.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stew until extremely tender. Brisket is a tough cut rich in connective tissue. Slow, gentle simmering over long periods breaks that tissue down into gelatin, so the meat becomes tender. Rushing or boiling hard leaves it tough.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, onion, celery, ketchup, port wine):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, onion, celery, ketchup, port wine. 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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