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Breakfast Stew

A stew of cold meat, flour, butter, and brown gravy simmered with onion, pepper, salt, and optional lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Breakfast Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Sift flour over the cold meat and fry in butter until browned.

  2. Transfer to a saucepan with brown gravy.

  3. Add minced onion, butter rolled in flour, pepper, and salt.

  4. Stew slowly without boiling.

Finish and serve

  1. Squeeze in lemon juice if desired 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Coats the meat so it browns well and helps thicken the gravy.
Butter
Fries the meat for browning and, rolled in flour, thickens the stew.
Brown gravy
Provides the liquid base and savoury flavour for the stew.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth as it softens in the stew.

The step that matters

Stew slowly without boiling. Gentle heat keeps the meat tender and lets the flour-thickened sauce become smooth. A hard boil can toughen the meat and cause the sauce to break or stick.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, flour, butter, onion, pepper):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, flour, butter, onion, 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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