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Plainly Stewed Beef

A slow‑cooked beef stew with onions, celery, carrots, turnips, herbs, mushrooms, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot 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 ↓

Plainly Stewed Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Bind the beef firmly.

  2. Half roast the beef.

Stew

  1. Cover the beef with beef broth or gravy.

  2. Stew gently for 6 to 8 hours.

  3. Skim off the scum.

  4. Add the onions, celery, carrots, turnips, and herbs after skimming.

  5. Check if the beef is tender by probing with a skewer.

  6. Remove the fillets.

  7. Stew in strong gravy with mushrooms and sherry for 1 hour.

  8. Thicken the gravy with a brown roux.

  9. Season the gravy with salt and cayenne.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish with forcemeat balls rolled in egg and breadcrumbs.

  2. Fry the balls until golden.

  3. Serve with Espagnole sauce or brown gravy.

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. Celery + carrottop 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. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the meat that becomes tender through long, slow stewing.
Beef broth or gravy
Keeps the beef moist and forms the base of the sauce.
Onions
Add sweetness and savory flavor to the stewing liquid.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavor and savory depth to the gravy.
Sherry or madeira
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the gravy.
Brown roux (in the method)
Thickens the gravy and adds body and toasted flavor.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 6 to 8 hours. Low, slow heat breaks down the tough connective tissue in beef so it turns tender. Boiling hard toughens muscle fibers and can leave the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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