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Boulli Beef

A boiled beef dish with turnips, carrots, and celery simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Boulli Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Braise the beef

  1. Place the brisket of beef in a kettle and cover it with water.

  2. Boil for 2 hours.

  3. Reduce heat and stew for 6 hours, adding water as needed.

  4. Add turnips, carrots, and celery to the kettle.

Finish and serve

  1. One hour before serving, remove some broth to fill your soup dish.

  2. In the removed broth, boil turnips, carrots, and celery cut into rounds or squares for 1 hour.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Beef + carrottop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,606 recipes

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

  5. Beef + celerytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Brisket of beef
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow stewing.
Turnips
Hold their shape during long cooking and add mild sweetness to the broth.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and colour to the broth and vegetables.
Celery
Adds savoury, aromatic flavour to the broth.

The step that matters

Reduce heat and stew gently. Stewing at a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil keeps the meat tender and the broth clear. Too much heat toughens the muscle fibres and makes the broth cloudy, so the liquid should barely bubble for the full six hours.

Swap the turnip

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

  1. Parsnipfits about as well
  2. Turnipthe original
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Leekfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, 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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