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Fillets of Beef with Anchovy

A dish of beef fillets cooked with anchovies, bacon, broth, wine, garlic, cloves, herbs, capers, flour, cream, and egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 834 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fillets of Beef with Anchovy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the anchovies in water for about 2 hours.

  2. Split the anchovies and mix them with the beef fillet and bacon.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil on low heat with broth, white wine, garlic, cloves, and herbs.

  2. Once cooked, strain the sauce.

  3. Add butter rolled in flour, cream, and capers to the sauce.

  4. Mix in the egg yolk and pour over the fillet.

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. Garlic + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together834 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Clove + caperstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together412 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. White wine + garlictop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,044 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Dissolve into the mixture to add a savoury, salty depth to the dish.
Flour
Rolled with butter and added to the sauce to thicken it.
Egg yolk
Mixed into the sauce to enrich it and give it a smoother, creamier body.
Cream
Added to the sauce to give it richness and a softer texture.
White wine
Simmered with the broth to add acidity and aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Mix in the egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens when heated gently but can scramble if the sauce is too hot. Add it off the heat or over very low heat, stirring constantly, so the sauce stays smooth and glossy.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, white wine, garlic, flour, cream, capers, egg):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, white wine, garlic, flour, cream, capers, egg. 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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