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To Stew Beef

A slow-cooked beef stew with carrots, celery, onions, herbs, and optional wine and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

To Stew Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. Place the beef in a pot and cover it with cold water, then cover the pot tightly.

  2. Boil for 3 to 4 hours, depending on the size of the beef.

  3. Cut the carrots and celery into small pieces and add them to the pot along with sweet herbs, peppercorns, mace, and onions stuck with cloves.

  4. Simmer for 2 to 3 hours, skimming off any fat that rises to the surface.

Finish the gravy

  1. Once the meat is tender, remove the onions, mince them, and fry in butter.

  2. Mix the fried onions into the gravy from the pot, seasoning with salt and cayenne or chili vinegar, and add mushroom or walnut ketchup.

  3. Thicken the gravy with a little flour and brown it with sugar if needed.

  4. Add port wine and curry powder, and optionally a clove of garlic, for enhanced flavor.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Long simmering breaks down connective tissue, making the meat tender and flavoring the broth.
Flour
Starch granules swell in the hot liquid, thickening the gravy into a body that clings to the meat.
Butter
Frying the onions in butter browns them and adds rich, savory flavor to the gravy.
Sugar
Heated sugar caramelizes, adding browning and a touch of sweetness to the gravy.
Onions
Cooking softens their sugars and adds aromatic sweetness that builds the gravy's base flavor.

The step that matters

Thickening the gravy with flour. Flour must be mixed in smoothly and simmered so its starch fully swells; added lumpy or too quickly, it clumps and leaves a raw, pasty taste.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, celery, mace, onion, butter, vinegar):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, celery, mace, onion, butter, vinegar. 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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