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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

Cook the beef

  1. Place the thick end of the brisket in a kettle and cover with water.

  2. Boil for 2 hours, then reduce heat and stew for 6 hours, adding water as needed.

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

Finish and serve

  1. One hour before serving, remove enough 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 in the broth and add mild sweetness as they cook.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and color to the broth and the vegetable garnish.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavor to the broth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Stewing the brisket gently. Keeping the broth at a gentle simmer, not a hard boil, lets the tough connective tissue in the brisket break down slowly into tender meat. Boiling hard toughens the muscle fibres and can make the broth cloudy.

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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