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Le Pot-au-feu

A boiled beef stew with vegetables and herbs, served with pickles, salad, roasted rabbit, and buttered apples.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 360 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Le Pot-au-feu

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Combine beef, coarse sea salt, and water in a large pot.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Add chopped vegetables and herbs.

  4. Simmer until the beef is tender.

  5. Remove the beef and strain the broth.

Serve

  1. Use the broth to make a vermicelli soup.

  2. Serve the beef with pickles, salad, and roasted rabbit.

  3. Cook apples in butter until soft.

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. Leek + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together360 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Onion + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

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

Beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Vegetables
Carrots, onions and leeks flavour the broth as they simmer.
Herbs
Thyme and bay leaf add aromatic flavour to the broth.
Vermicelli
Thin pasta that cooks quickly in the strained broth to make a soup.
Butter
Fat that cooks the apples gently, adding richness and softening them.

The step that matters

Simmer until the beef is tender. Boiling rather than gently simmering toughens meat proteins and makes the beef stringy. A slow, steady simmer breaks down connective tissue slowly, leaving the beef tender and the broth clear.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, onion, leek, thyme, rabbit, butter):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, onion, leek, thyme, rabbit, butter. 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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