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Bouillie Beef

A slow‑cooked beef stew with turnips, carrots, celery, and optional fried bread, greens, or mutton chops.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Bouillie Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. Place the brisket of beef in a kettle and cover it with water.

  2. Bring to a boil and simmer for 2 hours.

  3. Keep it warm by the fire for an additional 6 hours, adding water as needed.

  4. Add turnips, carrots, and celery to the kettle.

Make the soup and serve

  1. One hour before serving, remove some broth to fill a soup dish.

  2. In the removed broth, boil turnips, carrots, and celery for one hour, seasoning with salt and pepper.

  3. Optionally, add fried bread to the soup and boil greens in it.

  4. If desired, add fried mutton chops to the broth for richness, but remove them before serving.

  5. Serve the beef on one dish and the soup on another.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Brisket of beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering in water.
Turnips
Hold their shape and add mild sweetness and body to the broth.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and color to the broth as they soften.
Celery
Adds a savory, aromatic flavor to the broth.

The step that matters

Keeping the beef at a gentle simmer for the long holding period. Collagen in brisket breaks down slowly at low, steady heat, becoming gelatin that makes the meat tender. A hard boil toughens muscle fibers and can dry the meat, while keeping the liquid covered and topped up preserves moisture.

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, celery, pepper, bread, mutton):

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Turnipthe original
  4. Leekfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, celery, pepper, bread, mutton. 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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