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Beef Hot Pot

A stew of beef ribs, onions, green peppers, and assorted seasonings served over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and chive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,907 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Beef Hot Pot

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Heat the dripping in a saucepan.

  2. Add the beef ribs, chopped onions, tiny green peppers, minced chives, and other ingredients.

  3. Cover closely and stew until the mixture is very tender.

  4. Thicken the stew with butter rolled in browned flour.

Serve

  1. Serve the hot pot on the slices of toast.

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. Onion + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Thyme + olivetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,948 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (apple, fatty).

  4. Chive + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  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

Beef ribs
Provide the main meat, which becomes very tender during long, covered stewing.
Browned flour (in the method)
Thickens the stew liquid, giving it body and a toasty, nutty flavour.
Butter (in the method)
Rolled with the browned flour, it enriches the sauce and helps it thicken smoothly.
Onions
Break down during stewing, adding sweetness and savoury depth to the broth.

The step that matters

Thicken the stew with butter rolled in browned flour.. Flour added directly to hot liquid can clump. Rolling it with butter coats the flour so it disperses evenly, giving a smooth, thickened stew.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, pepper, chive, vinegar, thyme, olive):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, pepper, chive, vinegar, thyme, olive. 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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