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Good Beef Stew

A hearty stew made with round steak, butter, water, pepper, sea salt, and optional onion, olives, and mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,571 recipes. Both carry trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Good Beef Stew

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Brown the round steak well on both sides in butter.

  2. Add 1 pint of water and cover the pot.

  3. Cook slowly for 2 hours.

  4. Add pepper, coarse sea salt, and minced onion if desired. Cook for an additional 30 minutes.

  5. For extra flavor, add stoned olives and mushrooms.

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. Olive + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,571 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Onion + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 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

Round steak
Forms the main body of the stew and becomes tender during slow cooking.
Butter
Browning fat that adds color and savory flavor to the meat's surface.
Water
Creates moist cooking liquid that gently braises the meat.

The step that matters

Browning the round steak well on both sides. Browning creates a deep brown crust through the Maillard reaction, which builds savory flavor in the finished stew. Pale, undercooked meat surfaces leave the stew tasting flat.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, olive, mushroom. 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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