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Boutllon or Pot-au-feu

A French beef soup with vegetables, served with toasted bread strips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 526 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boutllon or Pot-au-feu

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Lightly fry the beef slices in a little butter.

  2. Add ½ cup of water.

  3. Boil quickly to a glaze.

  4. Add the remaining water.

  5. Simmer for four hours.

  6. Half an hour before serving, add the sliced lettuce and celery.

Serve

  1. Toast the bread.

  2. Cut the toasted bread into strips.

  3. Place the strips in a bowl.

  4. Pour the soup over the bread, including the meat.

  5. Serve.

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. Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together976 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  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 meat and rich flavour that the broth is built on.
Water
Forms the broth that the vegetables and meat slowly release flavour into.
Bread
Soaks up the hot broth, becoming soft and giving the dish body.

The step that matters

Boil quickly to a glaze. Fast boiling briefly reduces the liquid around the browned meat, concentrating its flavour into a glaze. Boiling too long can make the meat tough, so the heat must stay controlled.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, onion, sugar, butter, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, onion, sugar, butter, bread. 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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