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To Stew Beef Steaks

Stewed beef steaks with bacon, butter, brown gravy, pickled mushrooms, cucumber, morels, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,232 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Stew Beef Steaks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Season the beef steaks with salt, pepper, and chopped onion.

  2. Layer the steaks in a stew pan with slices of bacon and butter.

  3. Stew over low heat for 15 minutes.

  4. Add brown gravy, pickled mushrooms, cucumber, morels, and port wine.

  5. Continue stewing until the steaks are tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the bacon and skim off the fat.

  2. Thicken the gravy with butter rolled in flour and serve with bread snippets.

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. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Onion + cucumbertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,050 recipes

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

  5. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 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

Beef steaks
Provide the meat that becomes tender through long, slow stewing in liquid.
Brown gravy
Supplies the liquid base that moistens the meat and carries the flavour of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and with flour forms a roux that thickens the gravy.
Bacon
Releases fat and smoky flavour into the stew as it cooks.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the gravy.

The step that matters

Continue stewing until the steaks are tender. Tough cuts of beef need long, low, moist cooking so collagen breaks down into gelatin. Stopping early leaves the meat chewy, and boiling hard can toughen the fibres and dry the surface.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, onion, butter, mushroom, port wine):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, onion, butter, mushroom, 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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