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Pot-au-feu

A slow‑cooked beef and vegetable stew simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pot-au-feu

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. Place the beef in a porcelain kettle and cover the kettle with cold water.

  2. Bring the water to a boil and skim the surface carefully.

  3. Add salt and peppercorns.

  4. Boil very slowly for 3 hours.

Add the vegetables

  1. Add the sliced onions browned in butter, leeks, parsnip, turnips, carrots, cabbage, celery, and bay leaf.

  2. Boil very slowly for 2 more hours.

Serve

  1. Remove the beef.

  2. Arrange the vegetables around the beef.

  3. Strain the broth.

  4. Pour a little broth over the beef.

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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsnip + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together590 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Leek + parsniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,097 recipes

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

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

Lean beef
Provides the meat that becomes tender during long, slow simmering.
Leeks
Contribute mild onion-like sweetness and aroma to the broth.
Parsnip
Adds natural sweetness and body as it softens in the broth.
Onions
Browning in butter first adds deeper, sweeter flavor to the broth.

The step that matters

Boil very slowly. A gentle simmer keeps the broth clear and lets the beef turn tender. A hard rolling boil emulsifies fat and fibres into a cloudy broth and toughens the meat.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, butter, leek, parsnip, turnip, carrot. 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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