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To Stew Beef

A slow‑cooked beef stew with carrots, celery, onions, herbs, and optional wine, curry, and garlic.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery 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 ↓

To Stew Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Braise the beef

  1. Place the beef in a pot and cover it with cold water.

  2. Cover the pot tightly.

  3. Boil for 3-4 hours, depending on the size of the beef.

  4. Add diced carrots, celery, sweet herbs, peppercorns, mace, and onions stuck with cloves.

  5. Simmer for 2-3 hours.

  6. Skim off any grease that forms on top.

Make the gravy

  1. Remove the onions.

  2. Mince the onions.

  3. Fry the onions in butter.

  4. Mix the fried onions into the gravy from the meat.

  5. Season with salt and cayenne or chili vinegar.

  6. Add mushroom or walnut ketchup.

  7. Thicken the gravy with flour.

  8. Brown the gravy with burnt sugar for color and flavor.

  9. Add port wine.

  10. Add curry powder.

  11. Optionally add a clove of garlic.

  12. Garnish with vegetables 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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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 during long, slow cooking in liquid.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the meat and vegetables.
Onions
Add sweetness and savory depth when fried and stirred into the gravy.
Sugar
Burnt sugar adds browned color and a deeper, slightly bitter flavor to the gravy.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the stock as they cook.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavor to the stock as it simmers.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy with flour. Flour must be cooked in fat or well stirred into liquid, otherwise it forms lumps and leaves a raw starchy taste. Gentle simmering after adding it lets the starch swell and thicken the gravy evenly.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, meat, carrot, celery, mace, onion, butter):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, meat, carrot, celery, mace, onion, butter. 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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