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Braised Fillets of Beef

Braised fillets of beef cooked slowly with bacon fat, bouquet garni, carrots, onion, celery, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Braised Fillets of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Cut the beef into small fillets, about the size of a coffee cup and ¾ inch thick.

  2. Cut the bacon fat into strips, 1 inch long and ⅛ inch wide.

  3. Hold each fillet in a clean cloth and lard it with the bacon strips in regular rows.

Braise

  1. Place the larded fillets in a clean sauté pan.

  2. Add the bouquet garni, carrots (halved), onion (peeled), and celery to the pan.

  3. Pour in the stock, ensuring it does not cover the meat, and place the pan on the heat.

  4. Baste the fillets continually while cooking.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Thyme + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fillet of beef
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender through slow, moist cooking.
Bacon fat
Strips threaded through the beef add fat that melts during cooking, adding moisture and flavour.
Good stock
Liquid that braises the meat and forms the base of the sauce.
Carrots
Aromatic vegetables that release sweetness and flavour into the braising liquid.

The step that matters

Keep the stock below the top of the meat. Braising works best when the meat is partly exposed, so the surface browns and develops flavour while the lower part simmers gently. Fully submerged meat cooks by boiling and turns grey and less flavourful.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, parsley, thyme, carrot, celery):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, parsley, thyme, carrot, celery. 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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