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Stewed Beef Steak

A stew of beef steak with onion, carrot, turnip, herbs, and a butter‑flour gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Stewed Beef Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the steak

  1. Heat the butter in a pan until hot.

  2. Brown the steak in the butter.

  3. Add the onion and flour.

  4. Gradually add the water and bring to a boil.

Stew

  1. Add the vegetables, herbs, and steak.

  2. Simmer very slowly for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve the steak and vegetables on top, or strain the gravy over the steak.

  2. Garnish with fancy cut carrots and turnips boiled in separate pans with boiling water, sugar, and salt.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Steak
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender during the long slow simmer.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy as it heats with the butter and water.
Butter or dripping
Carries the browning of the steak and adds richness to the gravy.
Onion
Adds savoury depth and aroma to the gravy as it softens in the pan.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and body to the stewed vegetables and gravy.
Turnip
Adds mild, slightly sweet flavour and body to the stew.

The step that matters

Simmer very slowly for 2 hours. Gentle heat slowly breaks down the tough connective tissue in the beef, making it tender. Boiling hard toughens muscle fibres and can leave the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, butter, flour, parsley, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, butter, flour, parsley, sugar. 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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