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Braising Meat

A slow-cooked dish of tough meat braised with ham, vegetables, herbs, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 590 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Braising Meat

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place the tough meat in a closely covered pot and add a small quantity of water.

  2. Surround the meat with slices of ham, carrots, parsnips, turnips, onions, and herbs.

  3. Add the bay leaf, cloves, and a small quantity of meat stock.

  4. Cook slowly until the meat is soft and digestible.

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. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Tough meat
Long, slow cooking breaks down its connective tissue, making it tender and digestible.
Slices of ham or bacon
Adds savoury, salty flavour that seasons the meat and the surrounding liquid.
Onions
Release sweetness and aromatic flavour into the braising liquid as they cook.
Good meat stock
Supplies liquid and savoury depth so the meat braises rather than dries out.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until the meat is soft and digestible. Tough cuts need low, gentle heat over a long time so collagen slowly converts to gelatin. Rushing with high heat leaves the meat firm and chewy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, ham, carrot, parsnip, turnip, clove):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, ham, carrot, parsnip, turnip, clove. 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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