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Stewed Ox Cheek

A stew made with canned ox cheek, onions, carrots, turnips, butter, gravy, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Ox Cheek

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gravy

  1. Fry the onions in butter until golden.

  2. In a stewpan, combine the fried onions, gravy, and the liquid from the ox cheek.

Stew

  1. Add one whole onion with a few cloves stuck in it, celery seed, dried herbs in a muslin bag, and sliced carrots and turnips.

  2. Stew until the vegetables are tender.

Add the meat and finish

  1. Open the tin of ox cheek, remove the bone, and add the meat to the gravy to warm through.

  2. Stir in the chili vinegar and Worcestershire sauce.

  3. Ensure there is plenty of gravy; add more if needed, and add a splash of port wine for extra flavor.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox cheek
Rich meat that becomes tender and silky after long, slow stewing.
Onions
Sweetness and savory depth once fried golden in butter.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the meat and vegetables.
Butter
Adds fat and a nutty, browned flavor when frying the onions.
Carrots
Adds gentle sweetness and body to the stewed gravy.
Chili vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens and balances the rich gravy.

The step that matters

Stew until the vegetables are tender. A gentle simmer softens the vegetables and meat evenly and lets the gravy develop flavor. Boiling hard breaks the vegetables apart and can make the gravy cloudy and greasy.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, turnip, butter, flour, vinegar, ketchup):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, turnip, butter, flour, vinegar, ketchup. 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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