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Stewed Kidney

A stew of diced beef kidney simmered with onion, tomatoes, Worcestershire sauce, and thickened with a gravy‑flour paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Stewed Kidney

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the kidney

  1. Soak the beef kidney in cold water for 10 minutes.

  2. Remove all fat and skin, then chop into small dice-sized pieces.

  3. Place in a stew pot and cover with cold water.

Cook and thicken

  1. Add onion, salt, pepper, tomatoes, and Worcestershire sauce.

  2. Simmer on low heat for about 1 hour until tender.

  3. Mix gravy with flour to form a smooth paste, then stir into the kidney mixture until thickened.

  4. Simmer a little longer and serve hot.

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. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  3. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 recipes

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

  4. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  5. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 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 kidney
Forms the main body of the stew and becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, stew-like sauce when mixed into a paste first.
Canned tomatoes
Add acidity and body to the sauce, balancing the rich flavour of the kidney.
Gravy
Adds savoury meaty flavour to the sauce as it thickens.

The step that matters

Simmering until tender. Kidney is firm and can stay tough if undercooked, so it needs low, steady simmering rather than a hard boil. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can make the sauce break or stick. Cooking gently lets the connective tissue soften slowly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pepper, tomato, sauce, flour):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, tomato, sauce, flour. 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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