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Spanish Stew

A slow‑cooked beef stew with tomatoes, onions, garlic, chili peppers, and drippings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Spanish Stew

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the steak in drippings until browned.

  2. Add garlic, onion, chopped peppers, tomatoes, and salt.

  3. Simmer for two hours.

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 + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Round steak
Provides the meat that becomes tender during the long simmer.
Tomatoes
Add moisture and acidity that help form the stew's sauce.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aroma as it softens in the pot.
Chili peppers
Add heat and aroma to the stew.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that mellows during cooking.

The step that matters

Frying the steak until browned. Browning creates deeper flavor through the Maillard reaction. Steak that is only greyed in the pan will taste flatter after simmering, so brown it in batches if needed rather than crowding the pan.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, onion, pepper, garlic):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Oreganofits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, onion, pepper, garlic. 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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