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Bouilli Beef

A boiled beef dish with carrots, turnips, onions, red wine, mustard, soy sauce, pickled cucumbers, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Bouilli Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beef

  1. Place brisket in saucepan and cover with cold water.

  2. Bring to a boil and skim off the scum.

Simmer

  1. Add diced carrots, turnips, and onion, along with clove-studded onion.

  2. Simmer for 3 hours.

  3. Add red wine, mixed mustard, and soy sauce.

  4. Simmer for an additional hour.

Finish and serve

  1. Finely chop pickled cucumbers and sprinkle them over the beef.

  2. Stir a little flour into the gravy.

  3. Bring to a boil.

  4. Pour gravy over the meat.

  5. Serve very hot.

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. Turnip + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 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

Brisket of beef
Provides the main protein, which becomes tender through long, slow simmering.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the cooking liquid that forms the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth gravy as it comes to a boil.
Pickled cucumbers
Add sharp acidity that cuts through the richness of the beef.

The step that matters

Stir a little flour into the gravy. Flour must be fully dispersed in the liquid before boiling, or it will clump and leave lumps instead of a smooth, evenly thickened gravy.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, onion, red wine, mustard, sauce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, onion, red wine, mustard, sauce. 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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