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Vinaigrette of Beef

A vinaigrette made from leftover boiled beef, mustard, oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, herbs, onion, and garlic.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Vinaigrette of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the leftover boiled beef into thin slices.

Marinate

  1. Marinate the beef in a mixture of mustard, oil, and vinegar for one hour.

  2. Use equal parts oil and vinegar, or three times as much oil as vinegar, based on your taste.

  3. Add salt, pepper, and chopped herbs to the mixture.

  4. Optionally, add chopped onion and rub the mixture with garlic.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Mustard + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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

Left-over boiled beef
Provides the main meat, which soaks up the dressing during marinating.
Oil
Carries flavor and adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the dressing.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps tenderize the beef.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavor and helps emulsify the oil and vinegar into the dressing.

The step that matters

Marinating the beef for one hour. The beef is already cooked, so the marinade only needs to flavor and soften its surface. Slicing it thinly lets the acid and oil penetrate evenly, and leaving it too long can make the texture mushy or overly sour.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, mustard, vinegar, pepper, clove, garlic):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Broccolifits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, mustard, vinegar, pepper, clove, garlic. 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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