Skip to main content
Main

To Stew Brisket of Beef

A slow‑cooked beef brisket stew with root vegetables and optional suet dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 stew

  1. Place the brisket in a stewpot with a small quantity of water and bring to a boil.

  2. Skim the surface thoroughly, then add carrots, turnips, onions, celery, and peppercorns.

  3. Stew until the meat is extremely tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the flat bones and all fat from the soup.

  2. For added flavor, include small suet dumplings in the soup.

  3. Serve the meat and soup in a tureen or separately, garnished with vegetables.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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 meat that becomes tender during long, slow stewing and enriches the broth.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and aroma to the broth as they cook.
Onions
Build savory depth and aroma in the broth as they soften.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavor to the broth during stewing.

The step that matters

Stew until the meat is extremely tender. Brisket is a tough cut rich in connective tissue. Slow, gentle simmering over a long time breaks down collagen into gelatin, which makes the meat tender and gives the broth body. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and cloud the broth.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

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

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes