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Hough of Beef Stewed

A slow‑cooked stew of hough of beef with carrots, turnip, onions, and optional ketchup and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Hough of Beef Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the meat

  1. Remove all marrow from the bone and cut it into small bits.

  2. Heat the marrow in a stew pan.

  3. Add the piece of meat and brown it on all sides.

  4. Pour off any excess fat.

Stew

  1. Add 1 pint of water.

  2. Cover the pot.

  3. Stew very slowly for 1 hour.

  4. Add the carrot, turnip, and onions.

  5. Continue stewing for an additional 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat on a dish with the vegetables around it and pour the gravy over.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

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

  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

Hough of beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long slow stewing.
Marrow (in the method)
Adds rich fat and flavor to the pot as it melts into the cooking liquid.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the stewed gravy.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and body to the stew as it softens.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and a tender texture to the stew.

The step that matters

Stew very slowly. Low, gentle heat lets the tough connective tissue in the hough break down into gelatin, making the meat tender. Boiling hard toughens the meat and makes the gravy cloudy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, ketchup, flour, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, ketchup, flour, 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.

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