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Stewed Beef

A hearty stew of brisket, onions, celery, carrot, turnips, and sorrel, finished with a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Stew the brisket in 5 quarts of water in a large pot.

  2. Add the onions, celery, carrot, turnips, sorrel leaves, black pepper, and salt.

  3. Stew gently for 6 hours.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Scrape and fry the turnips in butter until brown for the gravy.

  2. Add pepper, salt, and a little cayenne to the turnips.

  3. Thicken the gravy with flour and butter, then pour it over the beef with the carrots and turnips.

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 + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Brisket of beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the turnips brown when fried.
Turnips
Browning in butter adds savoury flavour to the gravy.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 6 hours. Long, low simmering breaks down the tough connective tissue in brisket, making it tender. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and make the broth cloudy.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, clove, celery, carrot, turnip, sorrel, 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.

More beef stew recipes

with Dumplings 30Brazilian 20French 20Spiced 17Pudding 16English 15 See all 357 →

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