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Braised Fillet of Beef

A braised beef fillet cooked slowly with carrots, turnips, onions, lettuce, celery, tomatoes, herbs, and stock, finished with a caramelized sauce and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Braised Fillet of Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the carrots and turnips into oblong shapes.

  2. Trim the lettuces and celery, leaving the tomatoes and onions whole.

Braise

  1. Place all vegetables, herbs, spices, and stock in a stewpan and bring to a boil.

  2. Lay the trimmed fillet on top, cover with greased paper, and simmer gently for 1 to 2 hours until tender.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Transfer the meat to a dish and arrange the vegetables around it.

  2. Strain the stock, remove any fat with kitchen paper, and add a few drops of caramel.

  3. Boil the stock quickly until reduced by half with the lid off.

  4. Pour the sauce over the meat and serve garnished with grated horseradish.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Lean fillet
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender through slow simmering in liquid.
Stock
Provides the braising liquid, which cooks the meat gently and later forms the sauce.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stock as they soften during braising.
Onions
Release sugars and savoury flavour into the stock during long simmering.
Turnips
Contribute mild sweetness and soft texture to the braised vegetables.

The step that matters

Simmering the fillet gently. A gentle simmer keeps the liquid below a rolling boil, so the meat's connective tissue softens without the muscle fibres tightening and toughening. Boiling hard makes the meat dry and stringy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, lettuce, celery, tomato, parsley, thyme):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, lettuce, celery, tomato, parsley, thyme. 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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