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Beef Bouilli

A boiled beef stew with carrots, turnips, onions, celery, cloves, mustard, ketchup, wine, and flour-based gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Beef Bouilli

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Trim the beef, removing fat, gristle, and bone, wash it, and place it in a deep stew pan.

  2. Cover the beef with 1½ times its volume of cold water and bring to a boil, skimming off any scum.

Simmer

  1. Add the chopped vegetables and cloves, reduce heat to a gentle simmer, cover, and cook for 4 hours until tender.

  2. One hour before finishing, stir in mustard, ketchup, and wine if using, and keep covered.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Once the beef is done, remove it to a deep dish and keep warm.

  2. To make the gravy, mix flour with a little cold water and gradually add to the broth until thickened, then boil briefly.

  3. Serve the beef topped with mixed pickles for garnish.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 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
Long, gentle simmering breaks down connective tissue, leaving the meat tender and moist.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavour to the long-cooked broth that later becomes the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a gravy as its starch swells when heated.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that balances the richness of the beef and broth.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity that deepen the savoury flavour of the broth.

The step that matters

Gently simmering the beef. A hard boil toughens meat proteins and can make the broth cloudy, so the heat must stay low enough for a gentle simmer over the four hours that tenderise the beef.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, onion, celery, mustard, ketchup):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, onion, celery, mustard, ketchup. 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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