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Beef Bouilli

A boiled beef dish with carrots, turnip, onion, potatoes, suet, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beef Bouilli

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beef

  1. Tie the beef into a neat shape with muslin and place it in a large stewing pan.

  2. Cover the beef with boiling water and simmer over moderate heat.

  3. Skim the surface carefully and cook for 45 minutes per pound.

  4. When the meat is half done, add salt, carrot, turnip, and onion.

  5. Fifteen minutes before serving, add the sliced potatoes.

Thicken and serve

  1. Once cooked, remove the meat and rub together suet and flour.

  2. Stir the mixture into the boiling stew and season to taste.

  3. Serve in a tureen, reserving some vegetables to garnish the meat.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Round beef
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender as it simmers slowly in water.
Suet
Adds richness and body, helping to thicken and enrich the broth when rubbed with flour.
Flour
Thickens the broth when mixed with suet and stirred into the boiling stew.
Potatoes
Add starch and body to the stew, softening as they cook in the broth.

The step that matters

Stir the suet and flour into the boiling stew. Stirring the flour mixture into a boiling liquid helps it disperse evenly and thicken smoothly. Adding it to a cooler liquid or without stirring can leave lumps.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, potato, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, potato, flour. 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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