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Another Way to Stew Beef

A slow‑cooked beef stew with onions, carrots, herbs, lemon, and a clarified gravy thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,232 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Another Way to Stew Beef

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a well buttered saucepan, place the brisket of beef. Add the onions, carrots, sweet herbs, lemon, and water.

  2. Let it stew for 7 hours.

  3. Strain and clarify the gravy. Thicken the gravy with butter and flour.

  4. Chop the carrots and mix with capers, mushroom ketchup, and cayenne. Add any other preferred pickles.

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

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

  2. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 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. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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, slow stewing.
Butter
Enriches the gravy and, with flour, forms the base for thickening it.
Flour
Thickens the gravy when cooked with butter, giving it body.
Carrots
Adds sweetness and body to the stew and is later chopped for the garnish mix.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy with butter and flour. Flour must be cooked into the butter before the liquid is added, or it stays lumpy and tastes raw. Cooking it in fat also gives the gravy a smooth, glossy body.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, carrot, butter, flour, capers, mushroom):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, carrot, butter, flour, capers, mushroom. 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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