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Fillet of Beef

A roasted beef fillet seasoned with salt, pepper, and flour, finished with butter, cracker crumbs, and mushroom gravy, garnished with nasturtium leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Fillet of Beef

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the fillet

  1. Remove all veins, tough portions, and most of the fat from the fillet.

  2. Rub the fillet with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and flour.

  3. Place the fat pieces and slices of salt pork in the bottom of a roasting pan.

Roast and finish

  1. Preheat the oven to 400 °F (200 °C) and bake the fillet for about 40 minutes.

  2. Remove the fillet and baste it thoroughly.

  3. Sift cracker crumbs over the fillet and add several bits of butter on top.

  4. Return the fillet to the oven to brown quickly, then remove it.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Make gravy as directed for brown gravy, adding fried mushrooms to a portion of it.

  2. Serve the fillet with the gravy and garnish with nasturtium leaves.

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Pork + mushroomtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-propylphenol (allspice, anise).

  5. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 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

Beef fillet
Forms the main body of the dish; lean meat that cooks to a tender, sliceable texture.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the crumb topping brown in the oven.
Cracker crumbs
Form a crisp, browned crust on the outside of the fillet.
Flour
Dusted on the surface to help form a browned crust and thicken the pan juices.
Salt pork
Renders fat into the roasting pan, adding moisture and savory flavor to the meat.

The step that matters

Return the fillet to the oven to brown quickly. Fillet is lean and cooks fast, so a short, hot finish browns the crumb crust without overcooking the interior. Leaving it too long dries the meat.

“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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