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Stewed Ox-cheek and Cow-heel

A slow‑cooked stew of ox cheek and cow heel with carrots, turnip, onions, celery, herbs, and a flour‑thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,225 recipes. Both carry terpineol, which smells pine, woody. The science ↓

Stewed Ox-cheek and Cow-heel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Cut the ox cheek and cow heel into pieces.

  2. Place them in a stewpan with the vegetables and cover with cold water.

  3. Add a little pepper and salt, and stew gently until tender, about 4 to 5 hours.

Thicken and serve

  1. When tender, thicken the gravy with flour, using 1 oz. of flour for every pint of gravy.

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. Thyme + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: terpineol (pine, woody).

  2. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Parsley + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,979 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  5. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox cheek
Breaks down during long stewing to give tender, gelatinous meat.
Cow heel
Its collagen melts into the liquid, giving the gravy body and a silky texture.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as its starch swells in the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Stewing gently until tender. Collagen in the cheek and heel only turns to gelatin with long, low, slow heat. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can leave the gravy cloudy and stringy, so keep the liquid at a bare simmer.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, thyme, marjoram, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, parsley, thyme, marjoram, 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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