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Hotch-potch

A beef and vegetable stew with a butter‑flour roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Hotch-potch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Combine beef, veal, and water in a stew-pan.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Add carrots, onions, celery, turnips, and cauliflower.

  4. Optionally add broad beans or green peas.

  5. Cover and simmer gently for 3 hours.

Make the roux and finish

  1. Melt butter in a pan and mix in flour.

  2. Let the mixture brown.

  3. Dilute the roux with a little broth.

  4. Add the roux to the stew.

  5. Bring the stew to a boil again.

  6. Season the stew with pepper and coarse sea salt to taste.

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. Turnip + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cauliflower + beanstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Marrow half of the round of beef
Provides meat flavour and body as it simmers into the broth.
Butter
Carries flavour and, with flour, forms the roux that thickens the stew.
Flour
Thickens the stew when cooked with butter into a roux and stirred in.

The step that matters

Browning the roux. Flour cooked in butter must be stirred and allowed to brown evenly. Undercooked roux tastes raw and thickens poorly, while overbrowned roux turns bitter and dark.

Swap the beans

The recipe marks beans as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, veal, carrot, onion, celery, turnip, cauliflower):

  1. Beansthe original
  2. Lentilsfits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits less well
  4. Peasfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, veal, carrot, onion, celery, turnip, cauliflower. 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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