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Beef Stew

A hearty stew of beef, turnips, carrots, potatoes, onions, and tomatoes simmered in water with flour and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew base

  1. Dissolve flour in a little cold water and stir it into 2 quarts of cold water along with the bay leaf, beef, and onions.

  2. Let the mixture simmer for three hours.

Add the vegetables and finish

  1. About 30 minutes before the meat is done, cook turnips, carrots, potatoes, and tomatoes in separate covered pots until tender.

  2. Drain the vegetables and add them to the meat and onions.

  3. Season the stew and cook everything together for five minutes to blend the flavors.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Potato + tomatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,798 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main savory meat flavor and chewy, tender texture after long simmering.
Flour
Dissolved into the cold liquid, it thickens the stew broth as it cooks.
Potatoes
Starchy body that softens into the broth and helps make the stew hearty.
Onions
Release sweetness and savory depth into the broth during the long simmer.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and firm texture that holds up during simmering.
Stewed tomatoes
Add acidity and liquid that round out the broth's flavor.

The step that matters

Simmering the meat for three hours. Beef is tough collagen-rich connective tissue; a gentle, steady simmer over a long time converts it to gelatin, giving tender meat. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and cloud the broth.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, beef, potato, onion, carrot, flour, pepper):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, beef, potato, onion, carrot, flour, 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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