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Fillet of Beef

A roasted beef fillet seasoned with salt, pepper, onion, and parsley, served with a Madeira sauce and vegetable garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Fillet of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut out the fillet from the sirloin and trim it.

  2. Lard the fillet and season it with salt, pepper, shredded onion, and parsley.

  3. Let it marinate overnight in the seasoning.

  4. Before roasting, remove the parsley and onion.

Roast and serve

  1. Place the fillet on a spit covered with buttered paper and roast.

  2. Five minutes before it's done, remove the paper.

  3. Serve the fillet in its own gravy, garnished with carrots, turnips, and cauliflowers, with Madeira sauce on the side.

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

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

  2. Turnip + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 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

Beef sirloin fillet
Forms the main roast; its lean muscle carries the meat's flavour and sets the texture when cooked.
Onion
Releases aromatic flavour into the seasoning during overnight marinating, then is removed before roasting.
Butter
Covers the paper around the meat, adding fat that keeps the surface moist and gently browned.

The step that matters

Removing the paper five minutes before the end. Taking the buttered paper off near the end lets the surface brown and crisp. Leaving it on too long keeps the outside pale and steamed rather than seared.

Swap the cauliflower

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pepper, onion, parsley, butter, carrot, turnip. 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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