Skip to main content
Main

Trembling Beef

A slow‑cooked beef stew with onions, turnips, carrots, butter‑flour gravy, and ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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 ↓

Trembling Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. Boil the brisket of beef gently for 5 to 6 hours until tender.

  2. Season the water with coarse sea salt, allspice, onions, turnips, and carrot.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a separate pan.

  2. Stir in the flour until smooth.

  3. Add the gravy and ketchup to the flour mixture.

  4. Add the chopped turnips and carrots to the mixture.

  5. Stew the mixture until the vegetables are tender.

  6. Season with pepper and salt.

  7. Skim off the fat.

Serve

  1. Slice the beef.

  2. Pour the sauce over the sliced beef before serving.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Allspice + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,021 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Allspice + turniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together445 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + carrottop 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
Becomes tender through long, gentle boiling, forming the main body of the dish.
Butter
Melted fat that combines with flour to start the thickened base of the sauce.
Flour
Stirred into melted butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce.
Gravy
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, adding savoury flavour and moisture.
Turnips
Soften during stewing and add body and mild sweetness to the sauce.
Onions
Add aromatic sweetness and flavour to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Stew the mixture until the vegetables are tender. Stewing gently softens the turnips and carrots fully and lets their flavour blend into the sauce. Cooking too hard can break the vegetables apart and make the sauce cloudy.

Swap the allspice

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

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

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

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes