Name: Beef Au Gratin
Ingredients: cold beef (boiled or roasted); butter; bread crumbs; chopped parsley; salt; pepper; lemon juice; broth

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Beef Au Gratin

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Slice the cold beef thinly.
Grease a tin pan with butter and dust with bread crumbs.
Add a little chopped parsley to the pan.

Assemble

Layer the slices of beef in the pan.
Season with salt, pepper, and parsley.
Dust with more bread crumbs.
Drizzle with lemon juice and add enough broth to cover the bottom of the pan.

Bake

Place the pan in the oven at 350°F (175°C).

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 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

Cold beef: Forms the main body of the dish, providing the substance that the other layers surround.
Butter: Greases the pan and adds richness, helping the bread crumbs brown lightly.
Bread crumbs: Form a crisp, golden topping and help keep the surface from drying out.
Broth: Adds moisture so the beef stays tender as it heats in the pan.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the savoury flavour of the beef and broth.

“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.