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Stewed Beef

A slow‑cooked beef joint stewed with vegetables, herbs, and optional mushrooms and sherry, served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 ↓

Stewed Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the beef

  1. Bind the beef firmly.

  2. Cover the beef with strong cold beef broth or gravy.

  3. Stew gently for 6 to 8 hours.

  4. Skim off any scum that rises.

  5. Add the onion, celery, carrots, turnips, and savory herbs after skimming.

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

  7. Remove the binding.

Finish and serve

  1. Serve with rich Espagnole or brown gravy.

  2. Half roast the joint before stewing it in strong gravy.

  3. Add mushrooms and sherry or Madeira an hour before serving.

  4. Thicken the gravy with a well-made brown roux.

  5. Season the gravy to taste.

  6. Roll forcemeat balls in egg and bread crumbs.

  7. Fry the balls until golden brown.

  8. Garnish the stew with the fried forcemeat balls.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Long gentle stewing breaks down connective tissue, making the meat tender and succulent.
Strong beef broth or gravy
Provides the cooking liquid that keeps the meat moist and forms the base of the sauce.
Onion
Releases savory aromatic flavour into the stewing liquid as it cooks down.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the stew as they soften.
Egg
Binds the bread crumbs to the forcemeat balls so they hold together and brown when fried.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp coating that browns when the forcemeat balls are fried.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 6 to 8 hours. Slow, gentle heat converts the beef's tough collagen into gelatin, which makes the meat tender. Boiling or rushing toughens the muscle fibres and dries the meat, so the heat must stay low and steady.

Swap the onion

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

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

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