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Beef Tremblet

A slow‑cooked brisket stew with onions, turnips, carrot, and a gravy of butter, flour, ketchup, browning, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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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 ↓

Beef Tremblet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Tie the fat end of the brisket tightly.

  2. Place the brisket in a pot of water and boil gently for 6 hours.

  3. Season the water with salt, all-spice, onions, turnips, and carrot.

Make the gravy and stew

  1. In a separate pan, melt butter and stir in flour until smooth.

  2. Add gravy, ketchup, browning, white wine, and small pieces of turnips and carrots.

  3. Stew gently until the roots are tender, seasoning with pepper and salt.

  4. Skim off the fat 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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Brisket of beef
Slow boiling turns the tough connective tissue tender, giving the stew its meaty body.
Butter
Melted with flour to form a roux that thickens the gravy and adds richness.
Flour
Stirred into melted butter to form a roux that thickens the liquid smoothly.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the rich, savoury gravy.
Turnips
Root vegetables that add body and a mild sweetness as they become tender.
Carrot
Root vegetable that adds natural sweetness and a tender texture to the stew.

The step that matters

Stir the flour into the melted butter until smooth. Flour must be fully mixed into the fat so it forms a smooth roux; clumps left undissolved will not thicken the gravy evenly when liquid is added.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, turnip, butter, flour, ketchup, white 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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