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Ragout a LA Chateaubriand

A veal ragout with onions, thyme, parsley, carrot, and gravy, garnished with fried small onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley 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 ↓

Ragout a LA Chateaubriand

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the meat

  1. Cut the veal into small pieces and fry in butter or dripping until light brown.

  2. Remove the meat from the pan.

Make the gravy

  1. Add flour to the remaining butter and cook for a few minutes.

  2. Stir in warm water, onion, thyme, parsley, sliced carrot, salt, and pepper.

  3. Return the meat to the pan and cover.

Finish and serve

  1. Once cooked, place the meat on a dish.

  2. Strain the gravy over the meat.

  3. Garnish with fried small onions.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Thyme + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal
Is the main meat, which browns in the fat and then becomes tender as it simmers.
Butter or dripping
Carries the heat for frying and adds browning and richness to the meat.
Flour
Thickens the gravy when cooked in the fat and then combined with the warm water.
Carrot
Adds subtle sweetness and aroma to the gravy as it simmers.
Onion
Adds savoury depth and aroma to the gravy as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the fat. Cooking the flour for a few minutes in the butter drives off its raw, floury taste and lets it thicken the liquid smoothly when the warm water is added. Adding liquid too early or skipping this cooking can leave lumps and a pasty flavour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, butter, flour, thyme, parsley, carrot, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, flour, thyme, parsley, carrot, pepper. 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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