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Of Beef

A beef stew flavored with onion, bay leaves, parsley, ginger, mace, allspice, lemon, vinegar, and calf's foot, simmered until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Combine the onion, bay leaves, parsley, ginger, salt, mace, allspice, lemon slices, and grated lemon peel in a bowl.

  2. Rub the mixture well into the meat.

Stew and serve

  1. Place the meat in a stew pan with vinegar, calf's foot, and water.

  2. Stew gently until tender.

  3. Skim off the fat from the gravy, strain it, and pour over the meat.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Ginger + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Parsley + allspicetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  5. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 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

Calf's foot
Adds gelatin, which thickens the gravy and gives it a rich, silky body.
Vinegar
Acidity tenderises the meat and brightens the flavour of the gravy.
Onion
Contributes savoury sweetness and aroma as it softens into the gravy.

The step that matters

Stew gently until tender. Low, slow heat lets connective tissue in the meat and calf's foot break down into gelatin. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can make the gravy cloudy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, parsley, ginger, allspice, lemon, vinegar):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, parsley, ginger, allspice, lemon, vinegar. 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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